Group Critical Illness Insurance

Group critical illness cover makes a statement to your team that you care about them being financially secure if they become really ill.  You can choose to insure everyone in your company or specific groups (I will explain this further in the bullets below). Each person has their own level cover within the group critical illness policy, so if one person makes a claim, everyone else is still covered by the policy.

Some key parts for you to know:

• From 3 people – Group critical illness cover can be arranged from as little as 3 people.
• Levels of cover – You can choose how much cover you want to arrange. It’s quite common for group critical illness cover to see each person insured for at least £100,000. You might choose to have some people insured for a flat benefit of say £200,000 and for others to have 3x their salary.
• Conditions covered – You tend to find that group critical illness cover will insure people for diagnosis of cancer, heart attack, stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinsons, kidney failure, major organ transplant, and more.
• PAYE employees – To be able to be insured by group critical illness cover the person needs to be on the company payroll and actively at work. There can be cases where non-salaried partners and non-salaried employees can be insured, but we would need to discuss this on a case by case basis.
• Premiums are paid for by the company – But! They are classed as a benefit in kind.
• Anti-selection – When you arrange group critical illness cover you can choose to insure all employees or specific groups. Let’s say that you want to insure just the Directors, you can absolutely do this. Anti-selection means that you have to insure everyone classed as a Director, regardless of if you want to or not. You can’t exclude Director C because they have been pulling their weight.
• Cost – Group critical illness cover is priced upon what is known as pooled risk. This is insurance gobbledygook for saying that the cost is cheaper per person, that if they had set up personal critical illness cover. 
• After a Claim – The policy stays active and the employee is still insured, but it’s uncommon for them to be covered for the same condition that they have already claimed on. This is really important as most personal critical illness policies stop once a claim is paid. There can be rules that say that the same person can only claim a maximum of X amount of times for a critical illness.

This type of insurance will pay out for a number of different critical illnesses, at specific severities set by the insurer. As an example, cancer is a claimable condition but it will often say ‘excluding less advanced cancers’ in the policy wording.