Affordability of private healthcare

We also gave people some information about the costs of different appointments and treatments to see if that made any difference to whether they thought they could afford it. The responses differed depending on the total cost.

For example, for a GP appointment costing between £40 and £200, a total of 43% of people who thought they could not afford private healthcare said that they either could definitely afford that cost, or that they thought they could find a way to pay for it.

For a cataract operation (£2,000 to £4,000) that proportion dropped to 18%, and for a hip replacement (£9,000 to £15,000) it dropped to 7%.

As with last year, it continues to appear to be the case that better information and transparency around price (especially for lower cost appointments and treatments) would help tackle perceived affordability barriers to people using private healthcare. Nevertheless, those barriers remain – especially for those with lower household incomes.

Our data shows that the availability of payment plans – allowing self-pay patients to spread the cost of treatment – would also make people more likely to consider accessing private healthcare if they had previously assumed they could not afford it. Some 42% of respondents said they would be somewhat or much more likely to consider using private healthcare if they could spread the cost of treatments.

People told us that they would consider cutting back on expenditure in other areas of their lives so that they could pay for private treatment.

This again indicates that better information about the costs of private treatment might mean that people who had assumed they could not afford it would make a different choice.