Bupa has lost 5% of its customers over the last year. That’s 142,000 people who have decided to drop their medical insurance. It’s not hard to imagine why. In a double-dip recession, insurance is a luxury that individuals, and companies, can choose to do without.
Bupa, however, thinks there is another explanation. It says private medical treatment has become too expensive, with the rise in cost not only outstripping inflation, but failing to reflect improvements in technology that should make operations cheaper.
Bupa sold its hospitals (it kept one, the Cromwell), and now contracts out to companies such as BMI, a division of General Healthcare, which has 70 private centres in Britain, or HCA, which owns big London names like the Wellington, the Lister, and