24/7 Video GP Appointments Within 3 Hours for Between £0 and £8 Per Month for You and Your Kids
Many companies offer Private Healthcare as part of their benefits package - and it is a very useful benefit should you need it, even if you do have to pay benefit-in-kind tax upon it.
But there is a more frequent health service that is far cheaper and arguably more beneficial even if have private Healthcare.
How many times have you had to access GP services this year? When you did was it a prompt service? Did you know how long you would have to wait to see a GP? Did you wish there were an out of hours service?
Enter the seldom considered and more frequently needed benefit of Health Cash Plans. The case am putting forward is different from the ones they advertise so keep with me.
For those unfamiliar with Health Cash Plans (and they are indeed very unsexy and poorly advertised) you pay a regular monthly amount and receive an allowance that you can claim back towards some regularly occurring medical maintenance type activities such as contact lenses/glasses/dental check-ups/teeth cleaning/fillings etc. And several of these companies offer as part of their standard membership, private free Video GP Services that can proscribe and many include dependents at no extra cost. This ancillary service is very valuable from a time and convenience perspective on its own and seldom considered.
Using Sovereign Health Cash Plan as a worked example:
If one were to sign up the parent with the most cause for contact lenses / dental work prescription it would cost £9.62 per month for Level 1 cover. For this you get unlimited 24/7 online GP appointments.
Also, you can reclaim the following costs annually (redemption via receipt) …
Dental = £60
Optical = £60
Prescription Charges = £16
Plus more stuff the details of which are here https://www.sovereignhealthcare.co.uk/personal/what-we-cover/
So you can quickly see that you can easily break even or exceed what you pay whilst enjoying the benefit of this GP service.
Here is a comparison table of Health Cash Plans and costs to give you an idea of what might work best for you.
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If you go ahead with Sovereign Healthcare add 570917 to the "Recommended by a Friend?" field so we both get £15 of M&S Vouchers
Learnings
Kids are included if at least one parent is covered so the optimum solution might be to sign up only one parent and choosing the parent that is most likely to use the allowances.
Each annual allowance term starts the moment you use it so it is optimal to make lots of claims at the beginning when you first join and when the allowance renews thereafter.
Some plans pay a birth of child allowance (in the example above £100). Oddly in the example above there is a 6 month qualifying period so if you are in the first 3 months of pregnancy there is a very compelling reason to join.