Journalist Graham Simons brings together views from advisers and insurers looking at the changing market, and what needs to happen next to support more businesses and more people within them. Read the full article here: www.abi.org.uk
It concludes with commentary from Equipsme’s CEO Matthew Reed.
Commenting on the piece, Matthew said: “What a great article from H&P and some really interesting perspectives on the future of workplace healthcare.
“If you look at the ABIs report a few years ago the numbers tell an interesting story. 4.8 million people are covered by workplace PMI, yet claims costs rose 16% in 2024, while membership grew by just 2%.2
“Yet demand for PMI is there – and growing - with general recognition (in this piece and beyond) that it needs to evolve to work for whole workforces and not just those at the top.
“The key challenge of that, of course, is budget. For me, three things stand out:
- Access – how do we extend meaningful healthcare support to the millions of employees currently without it?
- Affordability – how do we make budgets work harder rather than simply spending more?
- Outcomes – how do we demonstrate the real cost of sickness absence and the value of early intervention?
“The Keep Britain Working1 agenda is a real opportunity to rethink how we approach workforce health.
“It’s so interesting to see in the latest update the team looking to Europe for examples of risk pooling and community-rating – which is one of the founding principles of Equipsme.
“We’ve long believed there's a valuable middle ground between traditional PMI and cash plans, that it has to respond practically to both employee demand and employer requirements - and that the key to achieving it lies in pricing responsibly and sustainably.
“We’ve also done work to demonstrate real-life and real-time return on investment figures, with our latest version of ROI research3 which estimated that Equipsme plans could get people back to work two times faster than the NHS.
“It's encouraging to see the wider conversation moving in precisely these directions - to shape Britain’s very first Workplace Health System.
“Thanks to Graham for bringing together so many perspectives, and to Kathryn Vellacott, Rich Glassborow, Mark Waters, David Booth, Dave Morris, Rachel Western, Arun Thiyagarajan, Ally Antell and the other contributors for an interesting debate.”
Find out more about Equipsme plans at: www.equipsme.com/our-health-insurance-plans.
Author: Abi Stevens
Created Nov 2026
References
1 Keep Britain Working - GOV.UK
2 www.abi.org.uk/media-hub/news-post
3 www.equipsme.com/return-on-investment/
