Does your cancer cover match your requirements? Aug 07

Statistics have revealed that there are 1.2m people in Britain with cancer, and that this is increasing by 2.5% per year. The increase is due to earlier diagnosis, better treatments and an ageing population.

 

Continued advances in medical science will mean that within 20 years cancer could become a manageable condition like diabetes rather than a fatal disease. Leading health professionals feel that most cancers could be brought under control if more money was spent on prevention such as screening programmes to enable early diagnosis quickly followed by a course of the best drugs. However this will be a huge financial burden for the NHS.

 

Private health insurers are feeling the same pressures, according to BUPA’s Dr Franklin, while the number of BUPA customers claiming for cancer care had increased by only 10% in the last decade, the average charge per customer has gone up by 82%.   As with other insurers this is mainly due to the new cancer drugs which are expensive.  The cost of the new cancer drugs range between £20,000 and £40,000 per course,  but this isn’t the end of the story as routinely a combination of drugs is prescribed or courses are extended increasing the cost still further.

There are more drugs waiting to be licensed and these are likely to be even more expensive.  Insurers will have to think about how they deal with cancer treatment or premiums will increase to such a level as to be unaffordable.

Insurers are beginning to open the debate about how to deal with these spiralling costs.  Attitudes vary from insurer to insurer in respect of treatment, with BUPA offering the most comprehensive cover to include all stages of cancer.  Traditionally other insurers have stopped cover when the cancer becomes chronic.  However new constraints are coming into play with some insurers restricting cover according to the length of the treatment,  putting in a monetary limit on cancer treatment or options with no cover for cancer at all.  For larger claims related schemes it has always been possible to implement a ‘stop loss’ which could be specific to a particular claim and therefore limit the company’s exposure to a large claim.

With these increasing costs and different options available companies will need to decide if they want the cost of a £100,000 cancer treatment to come within their own policy and affect their future premiums or whether there should be better provision with a full range of cancer drugs under the NHS.

A leading UK cancer specialist,  Professor Karol Sikora, has suggested that there should be a ‘top-up’ system where cancer patients pay to upgrade their cancer care.  He thinks that unless there is a new system for paying for treatment, thousands will miss out on powerful new drugs.

‘Top-up’ policies could run in conjunction with a traditional private healthcare scheme or NHS treatment. WPA’s ‘mycancerdrugs’ policy is one of the first offerings of this type.  This policy gives access to a lifetime benefit of £50,000 for costly cancer drugs that have been denied by the NHS.

 

This area of cover will most certainly be the subject of much discussion and change over the coming years as both the NHS and private health insurers struggle to offer the treatment that is needed but at an affordable price.