So the consultant I met last week didn't send me any quotes... When I phoned the company she hadn't entered any of my details into their system either. So, I talked to a couple of consultants who were willing to give me actual quotes. The hospital cover plan we are looking at would cost $253.39 per month for the two of us including the lifetime health care cover and the 10% tax rebate and a $500 excess on hospital admission (only paid once per year per person if you need to go to hospital more than once). That's $3040 per year. My estimate of the Medicare surcharge is $3,100. So, it is about a breakeven in terms of upfront fees, as I expected. It turns out that my understanding of the lifetime health cover fee was wrong. If you don't join a private health scheme within a certain time of returning to Australia or immigrating and becoming eligible for Medicare then you pay the full loading. Your time out of Australia doesn't count. So our average loading would be about 20%.
I'm now thinking about the "extras" package, which covers stuff like dental and optical. The cheapest package adds $508 a year in costs, but none of their preferred optical providers are in our state and the benefits you can get on dental are also low outside of Victoria and South Australia which seems to be their major base. So, I don't think that extra package makes sense. Snork Maiden tends to use these services when she visits China.
This is our corporate health insurance deal. Probably, I should look at another quote before deciding on it.
P.S. 12:24pm
I just discovered this great government website that lets you compare alternative policies.
5 comments:
Hey moon. I found Frank health insurance to be amazingly cheap. It is like the industry/Internet only of fund and gave me the choice of various covers. Even better than a great corporate discount I was offered on many well known funds
Amazing, we are paying about $ 15 K a year for our medical insurance...
FI - In the Australian system, private healthcare piggybacks on the government system to some extent. We will still pay the standard Medicare levy which for us is $5000 a year since the tax was raised to 2%. It's hard to understand how the combination system works I think until you use it. So, now we have private insurance I think I will learn a lot about how things work really. The US system is the most expensive in the world in terms of share of GDP but doctors still seem to make good money in Australia.
We had private health cover for a while, as the basic cover was cheaper than the levy surcharge, but this changed (levy surcharge threshold got raised) so we don't bother with private cover at the moment. Having it for a couple of years when the loading was first introduced also 'set' our 'age' for loading purposed at 30 years, when we were actually mid-40s. Now that we don't have cover the loading with go up each year, but only from the 30-yr-old base rate.
One problem I found with the basic private cover was that it was essentially useless. DW couldn't get a private obstetrician when she was expecting, as there were no beds available in the local private hospital, and the private doctor wouldn't take her on as a patient if she was in the public hospital bed. And when I had a colonoscopy at the private hospital there was less waiting time (~2mo compared to ~6mo in the public system) and the procedure was more pleasant (better/more expensive option used for the anaesthetic) than the one I had a few years later in the public hospital system, but the public hospital version had no cost to me, while the private version still ended up costing almost $1,000 out of pocket in 'gap' charges....
Interesting... my sense is that you might often not get much different treatment in reality as you can end up a private patient in a public hospital. I also got the plan with the maximum excess, so if we do go to hospital we'll pay money where we wouldn't if we were purely public. Snork Maiden seems to think it will be like having private cover in the US, but that's not really the case I think.
Post a Comment