Impartial reviews on the latest products and how they can impact consumers.
March 2014 Allianz: iPMI
This plan is designed to meet the requirements for onshore healthcare cover for shipping companies’ employees’ set out under the Maritime Labour Convention 2006 (MLC). Although created by the International Labour Organisation in 2001, the MLC had to be ratified by at least 30 member states and this was not achieved until August 2012, with the Convention officially coming into effect a year later. It is already in effect in countries such as Cyprus, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden and comes into effect in the UK, France, Germany and Belgium in 2014. The MLC requires shipping companies to provide…
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March 2014 Skandia UK: CI
In December, Skandia announced the latest upgrades to its critical illness plans. The main changes introduced from 12 December 2013 are: • New partial condition for testicular cancer of low grade. This requires the removal of a testicle and pays the lower of 25% of the sum insured and £25,000. • Improvements to the definition of blindness and liver failure. On blindness the severity of the definition has been reduced to a visual acuity of 6/60 on a Snellen chart, and a central visual field of 20 degrees. On liver failure, the requirement for failure specifically due to cirrhosis has…
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March 2014 Denplan: Dental
Denplan’s relaunched Lucent dental plan now features a range of improvements based on feedback from clients, intermediaries and the dental industry. The main changes are: • On all cover levels of plan, benefits have been increased. For example, the old 4, 5 and 6 benefit levels now apply to levels 2, 3 and 4, with new higher benefits for levels 5 and 6. Level 1 continues to cover NHS treatment costs. • Dental implants cover is now included as standard. The highest annual benefit, on Lucent 6, is £300 (with the annual benefit decreasing to £200 on Lucent 1). However,…
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March 2014 InterGlobal: iPMI
In January InterGlobal announced that premiums this year will rise below medical inflation for the second successive year on its UltraCare plans. This follows last November’s announcement of higher benefit levels, especially for cancer. One of the main changes is that overall plan limits have been raised for 2014, by 50% to 135% depending on plan version. So, the UltraCare Comprehensive plan now has an annual limit of $4 million and the highest limit is on UltraCare Elite, where it is $5 million. Even the basic UltraCare Standard now has a $1.5 million annual plan limit. InterGlobal offers four UltraCare…
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March 2014 Practice Cover: IP
Practice Cover is a fairly new organisation based in Southampton that is ‘the UK’s only specialist provider of locum insurance for GPs, dentists and other medical professionals’. That latter group includes practice staff too. Director is Lynda Cox, who was previously head of product development at Skandia Life. Around half its business comes from IFAs. The logic behind offering specialist locum cover is simple – income protection (IP) insurance is essentially designed to provide an income if yours stops but, for some people, their income will actually continue but much of it may have to be spent paying a locum…
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