One of the most important decisions to make when setting up your Private Medical Insurance is the type of medical underwriting you choose. When taking out a personal policy you have a couple of options:
Full Medical Underwriting
You will need to disclose your entire medical history to the insurer from the start. As a result the insurer will take your health into consideration and any exclusions due to pre-existing medical conditions will be set out from the inception of the policy.
Moratorium
The most common type of medical underwriting for Health Insurance. Rather than asking about your medical history in full it simply excludes most pre-existing medical conditions you’ve suffered from over a set period, usually the past 5 years.
Switch or Continuing Personal Medical Exclusions (CPME)
If you already have Private Medical Insurance you might want to consider switch underwriting or Continuing Personal Medical Exclusions (CPME). Many insurers now offer these underwriting options.
CPME underwriting ensures that you retain the same level of health insurance cover when you switch providers. It is sometimes called ‘protected underwriting’, ‘switch’ or ‘no worse terms’. Under a CPME arrangement, the new PMI provider would copy any personal medical exclusions from the existing policy, meaning that your exclusions would remain the same. However, crucially, they would not add any new exclusions.
Which Medical Underwriting Is right?
There is no hard and fast rule whether moratorium or full medical underwriting will be the right option for you, so much depends on your personal circumstances and your state of health.
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