Andrew Tripp, the chairman of the Association of Medical Insurance Intermediaries [AMII] has come out with a somewhat bold statement of late "the health insurance sector is fairly recession proof". As I said this is a very bold thing to come out with when nobody is sure of what the future is going to hold in any sector of the economy. But is he correct? After all it would not be in his best interests to say anything less.
Well in some ways yes, and in other ways no. The simple fact is that sales in Small business health insurance policies are down, but they are certainly nowhere near following the general downturn in the economy. And of course there are mitigating factors in any such results, for example when companies downsize in order to tighten the belt during a recession, this automatically means they need less policies, but it is not a statement of their relationship with their own provider.
But it is also true that some companies will have changed providers in order to lower costs too. This is classic swings and roundabouts, the truth, as ever, is somewhere in the middle, some companies will be outperforming the national trend, whilst others will be underperforming. The truth is that bothing is recession proof, but sometimes certain sectors of the economy can buck the trend, currently the private health insurance market is doing this.
