Vitality FAQs

Health insurance pays for your treatment in the private medical sector if you fall ill or are affected by an acute medical condition.

Life insurance, on the other hand, pays a lump sum to your loved ones if you were to die during the term of the plan. It’s also possible to take out other plans, known as Critical or Serious Illness Cover, which will pay out a lump sum if you were to suffer from a specified serious illness. 

However, our health and life insurance do share two important similarities as well: firstly, unlike other providers, both are designed to help prevent illness and keep you in good health. That’s because they both give you the chance to earn rewards for getting active, like cinema tickets and weekly coffee. Rewards come as standard with Personal Healthcare plans and are available on Life plans that include Wellness Optimiser or Vitality Optimiser.

Secondly, both our health and life insurance have been independently rated 5-star by Defaqto – to give you the extra peace of mind that comes with knowing you’re taking out some of the highest-quality cover available.

It depends totally on your personal preferences and circumstances. For example, if you value guaranteed fast access to medical treatment, our health cover gives you exactly what you need. Similarly, if you’ve just bought property or started a family, life insurance is a good way to protect your family’s financial future, should anything ever happen to you.

You never know what life might bring. It’s more likely that you’ll need healthcare the older you get, but even if you’re in your 20s or 30s, health insurance can still be useful – for example if you need fast access to a GP because of an illness, or suffer from a sporting injury and need referral to a consultant or physiotherapist.

It’s a little different with life insurance, because there are different types of cover better suited to different stages in your life. For example, when you buy your first property, you might want to protect your income - and your mortgage - should you ever have to take time off work because of an accident or illness. Similarly, when you have children, you might feel the need to provide them with a little extra security for their future. And when you’re coming up to retirement, taking out some form of cover can give you extra peace of mind in your later years or give you the opportunity to leave a gift to your family.

The NHS will treat you for the conditions that private health insurance covers. It’s just that, in an era of high demand for healthcare, you may have longer to wait for certain treatments in the NHS.

With our private healthcare, you have the certainty of knowing you’ll have a video consultation with one of our private Vitality GPs within 48 hours and receive fast consultant referrals. So, in the end, it comes down to a matter of deciding how much you value speed of treatment.

You don’t need to have a medical, but you do need to tell us about any medical conditions you have as part of your application.

If you don’t have any pre-existing medical conditions when you take out a plan, you can just give us your personal details, pick your cover and answer some basic questions about your medical history. Depending on the answers, we may ask you for more information and exclude some medical conditions from your cover, or we may not offer you cover.

For more information on underwriting, call 0808 252 5548.

There’s more than one way to control your premiums for both health and life insurance. With health insurance, you have two main options. Firstly, you can choose an excess, in the same way as home or car insurance – the higher the excess you set, the lower your premium. Secondly, you you can save on your renewal premium by doing healthy things to raise your Vitality status which will limit any increases to renewal premiums.

For life insurance, you can cut the cost of your upfront premiums in the first year by up to 50%, if you add one of our Optimisers option to your plan. For fixed-term cover, the level of your starting discount depends on the length of the plan; for Whole of Life cover, it’s based on your age at the start of the plan.

Your Vitality status can allow you to keep your life insurance premiums low. For example with Vitality Optimiser, by reaching Gold Vitality status, your premium will stay the same as long as you maintain Gold status; if you reach Platinum Vitality status, your premium will go down by 1% a year, as long as you maintain Platinum status*.

There’s one more way to save money with our health and life insurance; by tracking your activity and getting active, you can earn a wide range of rewards and discounts from our partners. These include a cinema ticket at ODEON or Vue and a weekly handcrafted drink at Starbucks.