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When spouses, partners and children of policyholders are included, around eight million individuals can access private healthcare. This represents roughly 11.8% of the UK’s total population of 68.3 million.
NHS waiting times growing
Healthcare analytics firm LaingBuisson attributes this surge to increasingly long waits and declining satisfaction with NHS services. As NHS waiting times grow, more people are choosing private health insurance. Whether through personal plans or through employer-provided schemes, the promise of more immediate access to diagnostics and treatment is appealing to more and more people.
Among those insured, around 80% of policyholders – some 3.8 million individuals – benefit from employer-sponsored coverage. The remainder have opted to purchase private health insurance policies direct.
As a result, the expansion of private healthcare use has boosted the overall value of the combined medical and dental insurance market to a record £7.59 billion by the end of 2023, up 12.2% on a year earlier. £6.15 billion is attributable solely to medical cover, while dental insurance spending has passed £1 billion for the first time.
Quicker, more flexible care
LaingBuisson identifies four major insurers – Aviva, AXA Health, Bupa, and Vitality Health – as the dominant players in the market, owning around 95% of the private medical insurance space. Their collective growth reflects people’s frustrations with the broad systemic stress of public healthcare delivery and point to a rising demand for quicker, more flexible care.
Tim Read, Head of Research at LaingBuisson and author of the report on the condition of the UK health insurance market, states: “The rise in people covered by health insurance is being driven by both a rise in the number of companies taking out insurance on behalf of their employees, but there has also been a rise in the number of individuals taking out their own policies.
“Given we’ve seen people’s satisfaction with the NHS plummeting in recent years, and also continued challenges in accessing both diagnostic and treatment services on the NHS, this rise is not a surprise.
“In the past people may have taken out health insurance because it offered a better quality of service than the NHS. But now they value timely access more highly and increasingly are willing to pay for it.”