Comparing Australian Health Insurance Cover
Research shows there are many triggers that lead us to buy a health insurance policy.
These include:
- Having a Baby
- Getting Married
- Moving out of your parents house
- Retirement
I recently got married and tried to compare Health Insurance Covers and it’s really difficult to make a true cost/benefit ration of competing health funds. What I did find interesting though was that contrary to my expectations there are no savings by moving from a singles Health Insurance Policy to a Couples Health Insurance Policy. In fact, when I visited a local Health Fund they indicated that Couples Health Cover was developed decades ago with benefits back then but regulatory changes have since minimised this benefit.
Based on this I decided to pull out two singles cover for added flexibility.
The next area to look at is whether you want Hospital & Extras Cover or Just Hospital Cover. The way I see it, Hospital Cover is your insurance policy just in case something unexpected occurs (and this is your safety blanket) rather like car insurance. Extra’s insurance on the other hand is something you will use regularly and based on some costings for me and my wife, I ended up ahead overall by having this cover.
Therefore, I felt that for me and my partner hospital & Extras is the best option offering good value (in terms of the amount we could claim on yearly) while providing a safety net if we really did get sick/injured.
In later posts I will go through a few of the hospital and extra’s policies in more detail as there seem to be some complicated models (ie Medibank).