With private medical insurance, the more you pay, the more you gat in terms of cover and choice.
However, your choice of a health insurance policy may be restricted because of your age: some medical insurers will sell you a policy up to the age of 74 while others will turn you down if you are 60 or over.

Once you have bought your policy, most health insurance companies offer ‘guaranteed renewability’ which means that they will undertake not to cancel your policy at renewal or penalise you as a result of the number of claims which you make due to ill health.

However be aware that there is no guarantee that changes won’t be made to the scheme overall, nor that your premiums will not go up.

Although not necessarily advertised as such, there are broadly three sorts of policies: Top-of-the-range, Standard, and Budget.

Top-of-the-range private medical insurance policies are often given glamourous names such as Gold or Platinum and give the most cover and impose the fewest limitations on how much you can claim.
Cover typically includes extras such as complementary medicine (e.g. osteopathy and chiropractic) and home nursing.
Some health insurers add in the costs of private consultations with a GP, plus dentists’ and opticians’ charges.
Cover may even extend to treatment abroad. There is usually no limit on the amount you can claim for in-patient treatment (within the terms of the policy), though there may be individual limits for bills relating to out-patient treatment.

Standard health insurance policies cost less but impose limits on what you can claim in a number of ways. For example, they may:
• Restrict the overall amount you can claim in any one year with an annual limit
• Allow you only a certain number of days’ treatment each year
• Place cash limits on specific items of cover
• Limit your choice of hospital to certain providers.

If you go over any limits, you have to meet the difference between the cost of treatment and the amount the policy will provide.

Budget health insurance policies are about one third cheaper than standard policies and consequently pay out for fewer things. To keep costs down, as well as applying similar limits to standard policies, budget policies tend to restrict cover by:

• Paying out only if the waiting time for the NHS treatment is longer than six weeks – although these policies are becoming rarer
• Excluding the cost of the initial consultation and diagnosis
• Covering a limited range of illnesses only
• Paying for treatment only if you use an NHS pay-bed (private treatment in an NHS hospital) rather than a private hospital.