Letsbuyhealthcare launches healthcare coins in Mayo
LETSBUYHEALTHCARE, a new service providing easy access to, and funding of, private healthcare, has launched this week, starting with one provider in Mayo.
Local healthcare providers across the country delivering community healthcare, like Swanick Family Practice, Belmullet, have already signed up. The company expects its network of providers to grow as more customers sign up to the service.
Letsbuyhealthcare is a novel, but simple, approach to private healthcare. A new private health co-op has been set up whereby co-op members (and employers on their behalf) can build up their own private healthcare fund by buying €50 healthcare coin vouchers.
Families or individuals can then use their own dedicated healthcare fund to pay for treatment on the Letsbuyhealthcare portal.
The healthcare coin product is not-for-profit and any nett investment gains on the overall fund (professionally overseen by ILP Pension Trustees DAC - part of the Irish Life Group) will be re-distributed back to the co-op members by way of more healthcare coin vouchers.
Healthcare providers, employers and people across Mayo are invited to join.
Letsbuyhealthcare offers:
Easy access for self-payers to private healthcare through the Letsbuyhealthcare portal with a fast-growing network of private hospitals, GPs and other clinics.
An opportunity for employers to gift healthcare coin vouchers to any employee each year, tax-free, up to a value of €500.
Clear, transparent, medical treatment pricing and waiting time information.
No pre-existing conditions, age related or risk profiling. Anyone can join.
Both hospital and community healthcare providers on the same online shelf.
No annual premiums, no annual charges, no complicated products.
The portal is for the 20% in Ireland who do not have, or want, private insurance or a medical card. The voucher product is not private health insurance.
The brainchild of two healthcare industry experts, David Allen, former director of finance of the National Treatment Purchase Fund, and John Looney, a former director with VHI, intend for the private health co-op to also become an advocate for self-payers.
They have begun to lobby government for an increase in the tax breaks given to employers for any reward vouchers that are exclusively to meet an employee’s healthcare costs.
At the launch, managing director David Allen said: “Now for the first time there is a specific, safe and secure scheme that helps people plan for their own healthcare costs into the future. Everyone can now have their own separate family fund dedicated to private healthcare - and nothing else. Something that is built up over time to meet future routine GP and community-based medical services as well as trying to allow for any serious problems that potentially might need a consultation or day-case, inpatient or even a residential stay.
“People can now weigh up the likelihood of the family needing to access either public or private healthcare in the future, the likelihood of needing community or hospital care, the likelihood of needing psychological or physical care, or the likelihood of needing emergency or elective care and then try to decide, plan and budget accordingly, without any concerns that current age or current healthcare history will somehow be penalised.
“Importantly, this can all now be done in a way that is extremely simple and flexible to suit all pockets and can also be topped up by employers availing of tax breaks. It’s about choice. It’s about spreading the cost risk of private healthcare in a fundamentally different way to the traditional model.”