Cigna withdraws their Private Health Insurance from the UK market

Cigna are a comprehensive private health insurance provider, specialising in Employer PMI (private medical insurance) schemes. The US based company offer their insurance products across 200 countries worldwide. However, it has now been announced that Cigna’s company health insurance policies will be withdrawn from the UK market.

Our understanding is that Cigna will continue to offer renewals up until the end of 2022, but will then phase out the affected products completely.

Why is this concerning news?

Over the last few years there have been other cases of insurers pulling out of the UK market, but in these cases, they had lined up another insurer to pick up their book of business. So far, no insurer has been announced to take on Cigna’s UK customers.

Back in 2018 April UK terminated their UK health insurance products and arranged with AXA Health to guarantee renewal terms and continuation of underwriting to their customers. As Cigna have not come to such an agreement this could leave some people vulnerable.

When competing insurers quote for existing group schemes, generally the new insurer will consider the current price the company is paying along with their renewal quote to decide how to price the risk. However if Cigna is ceasing to offer renewals after December 2022, other insurers will have to guess the risk and are most likely to inflate the price where the risk cannot be quantified.

Who will be affected?

Groups with under 10 employees are most effected as they have to answer the most stringent set of medical questions to transfer provider and may not be able to do so without exclusions. Starting new medical underwriting or adding a medical exclusion can be detrimental to your cover, so we strongly urge to seek advice before you agree to this.

There is also a risk to any company with less than 100 employees on cover, as they are not always able to get continuation of underwriting from one provider to another without the need to answer medical questions.

Plans that will be affected:

Cigna Health Flex
Company Health
Essential Health
Your Health

What should you do?

Our advice would be to review your cover as early as possible, even if your renewal is not immediate, as this way you will at least know what your options are ahead of time. Being proactive in switching health insurers will prevent any new medical conditions that could arise, then being excluded.