Opinion
Brought to you by Australian Unity.
Most Australians set up their health insurance at an obvious point of their life. It’s usually around the time they started earning decent money, moved in with their partner, had a baby, or got a nudge from their employer to move to a ‘grown-up policy’.
They picked a policy, set up a direct debit and then largely forgot about it, claiming their health costs along the way with as little interaction with their health fund as they could manage.
I know this because I did exactly that. For more than two decades.
And I am here to tell you that the policy you set up in your late 20s or early 30s was designed for an entirely different version of your life. If you haven’t properly reviewed it since, there is a reasonable chance you are paying for things you will never use again, and not covered for things that are becoming genuinely and increasingly relevant.
One of the most persistent misconceptions in Australian health insurance is that gold cover is always better.
You are possibly thinking about health insurance differently to how it is designed to work today, too. And all of that means you’re probably not getting the best bang for your buck. And, in a cost-of-living environment where every dollar matters, it’s time to dive deeper.
The trigger that made me look For most people, the review of their health insurance in midlife doesn’t happen until something forces it. For me, it was finding out I probably needed cataract surgery.
It wasn’t an urgent diagnosis and I didn’t need it immediately. But the advice from my specialist was clear: “you’re going to want it sooner rather than later”.
So I reluctantly went looking at my policy
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