Health insurance in the United Kingdom
Main article: National Health Service
The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is a publicly funded healthcare system that provides coverage to everyone normally resident in the UK. It is not strictly insurance system because (a) there are no premiums collected, (b) costs are not charged at the patient level and (c) costs are not pre-paid from a pool. However, it does achieve the main aim of insurance which is to spread financial risk arising from ill-health. The costs of running the NHS (est. £104 billion in 2007-8) are met directly from general taxation.
Private health care has continued parallel to the NHS, paid for largely by private insurance, but it is used by less than 8% of the population, and generally as a top-up to NHS services.
The NHS provides the majority of health care in the UK, including primary care, in-patient care, long-term health care, ophthalmology and dentistry. Recently the private sector has been increasingly used to increase NHS capacity despite a large proportion of the British public opposing such involvement.[23]. According to the World Health Organization, government funding covered 86% of overall health care expenditures in the UK as of 2004, with private expenditures covering the remaining 14
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Health insurance has not become a necessary part of life not for only UK people but for all. As no one predict the future and with the raise in the cost of medical expenses it has now become very important to make this policy to meet them easily.
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