Health insurer drives progress and donates £822k surplus to good causes

Cash plan provider Medicash has today (September 10) announced that premium income increased by £1.9m in 2018 to reach £27.5m, in a year that also saw 69,000 new policies sold.

It also confirmed that, for the second consecutive year, it would donate its technical surplus, worth £822,000 to charities and wellbeing pojects.

In its annual results Liverpool-based Medicash announced that:

• Premium income rose by 7.5%
• Total policyholders covered increased to 244,589
• More than 400,000 claims paid – half of which were submitted via the Medicash app
• 96.3% of all claims received in 2018 were paid.

Medicash finance and IT director, Andy Roberts, said: “We are delighted with these results which reflect the hard work of everyone in the business. 2018 represented our eighth consecutive year of strong policyholder growth and 2019 is on course to be even stronger.

“Maintaining our focus on IT and technology, our app has gone from strength to strength and is now the main way our customers submit their claims to us.

“As well as streamlining the claims process for our customers, we continually invest in our IT infrastructure which enables us to maintain the lowest operating costs in the industry. This allows us to pay a high proportion of premiums back to our policyholders through their claims and ensures the business grows in a sustainable way.”

Paul Gambon, sales and marketing director at Medicash, said: “It’s great to see businesses are still investing in the health and wellbeing of their employees.

“There has been a big drive in employee wellbeing over the last 10 years and companies are more aware than ever that they need to look after their employees, not just physically but psychologically as well.

“Medicash gives them the tools to do just that, allowing companies to promote health and wellbeing across their entire workforce, and more and more companies are seeing the positive results.”

In March Medicash acquired the health, wellbeing and safety training provider Health@Work, who also own the nationally-recognised Workplace Wellbeing Charter accreditation scheme.

In 2017 the Medicash board took the extraordinary decision to donate its full technical account surplus to its charitable foundation. This has been replicated again with 2018’s technical surplus of £822,000 being transferred to The Medicash Foundation to help a wide range of health and wellbeing-focused charities and projects.

This brings the total transferred to more than £1.5m over the past two years.

As a result, The Medicash Foundation has recently supported projects such as training 100 new volunteers for the Samaritans, heart screenings for young people aged 15 to 35, and a variety of homelessness and food poverty projects.

Medicash also donated more than £50,000 to a range of hospices that support their local communities across the North West of England at the end of 2018.