I’m a couple of bad experiences away from getting health insurance for my family

The NHS is struggling to meet basic needs for many, pushing editor Edmund Greaves to consider health insurance for his family.

I do, quite frequently, think about getting health insurance. To this day I have yet to actually have something push me to take the leap and get a policy, but I feel a couple of bad experiences away from doing so.

My experiences with NHS healthcare have been varied, unfortunately. But largely this has not been for myself (thankfully), rather I have watched (and helped) family go through the system a lot.

I have had both parents in the system to a significant degree at varying times. My wife has been through the maternity system with our first son (and is currently on her way through it a second time).

I’m not going to go into the details of those experiences as they are deeply personal, but safe to say they were very mixed – particularly for my parents.

The maternity and subsequent paediatric provision has always been great, I will say. It will be interesting to see how experiencing the same process two years on differs with our second child due in December.

Where my personal sentiment on the NHS begins to chafe really comes down to the primary services we receive. I can count on one finger the number of times I’ve ever actually been granted access to my current GP, for example.

We routinely have to queue, sometimes for up to an hour, for our local pharmacies to fulfil prescriptions. This is thanks in large part to a major national pharmacy chain withdrawing from our town and putting pressure on the remaining provision.

And dental – don’t get me started. We live in a dental desert and have to drive over an hour away for an appointment. That appointment isn’t even on the NHS, those are rarer than (healthy!) hens teeth in Devon.

But does this push me into getting private medical insurance for our family? Our problem is largely a primary care deficiency.

More from Edmund Greaves

Time for health insurance?

The reality for our situation is that it feels hard to apportion some of our monthly income to a health insurance policy because, frankly, so much of my income already goes on taxes which pay for the NHS.

The Government has a fun tool you can use to tell you exactly how much of your taxes went where in a given tax year, out of interest. I am aware this is getting into the territory of crying over a sunk-cost fallacy but it hurts to look nonetheless.

In the most recent tax year, 2023/24 – just over 20% of my tax went to the NHS. This works out at just under £4,000 a year. My partner earns less than me (and ironically enough is a n NHS nurse which provides its own insights into the Byzantine Health Empire which I will forgo for today), but between us I’d calculate we’re roughly paying in around £6,000 a year just to the health system.

This is great inasmuch as we’ve actually used it quite a lot having our son etc. But it is also certainly a lot more than we’d pay for equivalent private health insurance, which comes without the queues and more free smart watches. For context – a private policy runs between £70 and £200 depending on circumstances.

So even if myself and my wife were both paying the top end (we wouldn’t because we’re under 40) we’d still be paying less than the equivalent in tax.

Controversially (and perhaps under-noticed as of yet) political parties such as Reform have floated giving people tax breaks for opting out of NHS care and using private insurance. Given the potential cost differential already mentioned, this could be an extremely compelling way to save tax for people who would have lower annual premiums (i.e. the healthy and young).

But the implications are fraught especially given that it is the taxes of the healthiest who are essentially footing the bill for those in poor health in the nationalised system.

In totality, the Government spent around £258 billion on healthcare in 2024. That’s a big number. For context, the Government spend £1,279 billion on everything it does in the tax year 2024/25.

Brits spent around £46 billion on so-called ‘out-of-pocket’ healthcare expenditure in 2024. What this means is for all the money spent on healthcare in the UK, around 15% came out of our own cash. The Government spends 81% of the money. Just 2.6% of spending is done by private health insurance schemes.

Interestingly, the out-of-pocket spending used to be higher – 20% in 1997. At that time health insurance accounted for just under 4%. What this tells me is that there is still a significant unsatisfied demand for private healthcare coverage. Why?

In this week’s podcast we were joined by Dr Katie Tryon, chief commercial officer at health insurance provider Vitality. We got Katie on the podcast as probably one of the best-placed people in the country to actually explain to us the nuts and bolts of how health insurance works.

For a more detailed guide, we’ve also written up all you need to know on health insurance.

Dr Tryon explained on the podcast that the biggest area of growth that Vitality is seeing with regard to its health cover is thanks to the deficiencies of NHS primary care (i.e. GPs) – the exact issue my family and I face routinely. Our problems are being mirrored up and down the land and this is driving people to spend money, regardless of the sunk cost of their tax.

But they’re not buying insurance instead. And this is costing us, collectively, billions every year.

My challenge here then, is how do we solve the clear issue of a lack of coverage? While I still don’t feel as if my family is at the point of taking the leap, what is clear is we’re collectively as a nation spending a lot of money on health treatments that could potentially be covered more affordably by the pooling power of the insurance market.

My worry is that it is a mindset issue. We eulogise the NHS. For many reasons this is perfectly fair given the nature of the institution and the impact it has on many of our lives.

Personally, I have seen the NHS at its best with the birth of my son. It was truly remarkable. Enough to make me clap on a Thursday evening. But I have also had a good look at it at its worst, particularly with what I went through with my mother many years ago.

Private healthcare is so often the bogeyman in arguments about how the NHS works and is funded. It is seen as the evil vulture capitalist in the room looking to ruin nationalised health from under our noses. But the mad thing is, while we argue over this, in the breach it is creating a coverage gap that is just making us poorer and less healthy.

It’s time we thought again about how to ensure everyone has their healthcare needs covered – through a combination of national and private health that doesn’t rely on judgement, just beneficial outcomes.

Photo Credits: Pexels