In Australia, not everybody needs private medical insurance, particularly if you’re in a life-threatening circumstance. In an emergency you will wind up on your nearest public hospital as an emergency ward patient and get high quality care at no cost.
If you will need an ambulance, personal cover is not always going to help with this price tag. For residents of Queensland and Tasmania, ambulance cover is provided at no cost by your state government. In Victoria, Northern Territory, South Australia and regional Western Australia you can buy an ambulance subscription. Ensure that before signing up for a policy, you look for basic health insurance covers in the contract.
Just in NSW, ACT and the Perth metro area is health insurance that the only way to get pay for ambulance. In those areas ambulance cover comes included in all hospital policies, or you might opt to purchase a lot cheaper ambulance-only policy.
Having an average premium cost increase of 66% since 2009, it is little wonder that the rate of individuals with private medical insurance is dropping.
Given the complexity of the products, we often turn to health insurance for advice. CHOICE believes that this is contributing to customers being downgraded into bad value ‘crap’ policies as insurance companies attempt to keep them in the system.
Another problem is that the reliance on for-profit comparison websites , all which have a clear incentive to sell you any sort of health insurance product — such as junk policies — instead of helping you figure out whether you require insurance in the first location.
