Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Poole, Freedom Health Insurance is a family-run business.
It offers Private Medical Insurance to businesses and individuals, both for UK residents and those living abroad under its Worldwide plan.
Freedom Elite is the company’s main Health Insurance offering.
However, it also offers Freedom Essentials (not covered here), which operates slightly differently. This provides a fixed cash benefit with no annual limit for eligible inpatient and day-patient treatment rather than a traditional Private Health Insurance plan.
Freedom Elite provides full coverage for eligible inpatient and day-patient treatment as standard. This is part of its core cover.
You then have the option to add outpatient cover to your policy for an additional premium.
Read more about the difference between inpatient and outpatient cover here.
Inpatient and day-patient treatment involves all medical care requiring a hospital bed. This might be overnight (inpatient) or just for the day (day-patient). This most commonly, but not exclusively, involves surgical procedures.
Inpatient & Day-Patient Coverage | |
|---|---|
Hospital treatment | ✅ |
Specialist / consultant fees | ✅ |
Scans | ✅ |
All medical care not requiring a hospital bed. This is an optional extra on a Freedom Elite plan for an additional premium.
Outpatient Coverage | |
|---|---|
Consultations | ✅ |
GP-referred diagnostic tests | ✅ |
Scans | ✅ |
Physiotherapy | ✅ |
If you add outpatient cover to your policy, you can choose whether Freedom pays for eligible outpatient treatment in full or limit coverage to £1,500 per policy year.
Alternatively, you can simply opt for core cover, which offers little outpatient care, to access Low Cost Health Insurance.
Cancer cover is one of the most valuable elements of any Private Medical Insurance policy. It pays for diagnosis and treatment of cancer, including offering access to drugs, treatments, therapies and procedures the NHS may not yet offer due to their cost.
Freedom Elite includes cancer coverage as standard.
Cancer Coverage | |
|---|---|
Chemotherapy | ✅ |
Cancer surgery | ✅ |
Radiotherapy | ✅ |
Biological therapies | ✅ |
Hormone therapies | ✅ |
Bone strengthening drugs | ✅ |
Stem cell / bone marrow transplants | ✅ |
Reconstructive surgery | ✅ |
Post-treatment followups / ongoing monitoring | ✅ |
Wig | ✅ |
Genetic testing to match chemotherapy to cancer | ✅ |
If your cancer becomes terminal, Freedom covers end of life or palliative care in full when used to relieve pain or other symptoms of end-stage cancer.
Your hospital list impacts which facilities you get private healthcare in and also how much your premiums will be. Some hospitals are more expensive than others, so opting for access to a wider array of private facilities increases premiums.
You can choose either Freedom’s standard list or pay an additional premium to access the London Plus list.
See Freedom’s hospital list in full here.
Becoming a Freedom client you also benefit from their ‘No Location-Based Pricing’. This means that premiums won’t increase based on where you live.
Joseph Toft
Health and Wellbeing Expert
When you apply for Health Insurance as an individual, you choose how you want your insurer to underwrite you.
Freedom offers two main underwriting options:
These are two very different options which can impact the way your insurer decides on exclusions for any pre-existing conditions you may have. The best underwriting for you depends on your circumstances.
Read more about the difference between full medical underwriting and moratorium underwriting here.
You can also switch to Freedom Elite from another provider on continued underwriting terms on a continued personal medical exclusions basis.
Freedom includes these as standard with Health Insurance:
You can choose to add these to your policy for an additional premium:
Freedom’s Health Insurance exclusions are fairly standard to those across other providers. For example, they include:
Freedom offers the option to add an excess to your policy, which is a sum of money you agree to pay upfront towards your private medical care. The higher your excess, the lower your monthly premiums.
However, you don’t have to add an excess and pay towards treatment if you don’t want to. Freedom provides a choice of excesses:
You pay your excess once per policy year. That means you can claim for multiple eligible conditions in a single policy year and only pay your excess once.
Freedom does not offer a no claims discount, unlike most other insurers.
Unlike other providers, Freedom does not offer the 6 week NHS wait option, which can be a way of keeping costs down by only paying for private inpatient treatment if the NHS wait for that treatment exceeds 6 weeks.
Freedom limits outpatient diagnostic tests such as X-rays and blood tests to £750 per policy year, even if you have full outpatient cover. Most providers cover these in full when you add outpatient care.
Once you’ve added your oldest child to your policy to create a Family Health Insurance plan, Freedom lets you add further younger children free of charge.
Freedom includes physiotherapy along with its outpatient cover. With some insurers, you don’t always get access to physiotherapy with outpatient cover. Other providers may only include it if you add another additional option (therapies) for a further extra premium.
With Freedom’s psychiatric care optional extra, the insurer pays in full for up to 45 days of inpatient mental health care. This is one of the longest periods of inpatient mental health treatment available on the market.
Freedom offers a discount on premiums of up to 6% if you pay your premiums annually rather than monthly. Not every insurer provides this facility.
As you can see, when you’re looking to compare private medical insurance there are a lot of different variations in cover that need to be considered. With so many factors and a lot of different terminology at play, it can be tricky to do an accurate like-for-like comparison between providers.
We started Drewberry™ because we were tired of being treated like a number.
We all deserve a first class service when it comes to issues as important as protecting our health. Below are just a few reasons why it makes sense to talk to us.
If you need help reviewing an existing Freedom plan or are looking to set-up a new medical insurance policy give us a call on 02074425880 or email help@drewberry.co.uk.