Federal Health Minister Mark Butler wants you to know that he has balls of steel.
You see, each year private health insurers must go cap in hand to him to increase their prices. And this year they wanted to deliver their biggest premium hike in six years – but he rejected it.
Bam!
Instead he’ll soon announce that he’s allowing a much smaller increase in your annual private health insurance premium.
Pow!
The truth?
The truth is the Minister doesn’t have the balls to tell you it’s a total farce.
But I do. So let me tell you how the game is really played … and how you are getting robbed:
While it’s technically true that private health insurers can only increase their prices once a year, and that old Steely Balls has to sign off on it, it’s also true that health insurers can close down existing policies and simultaneously release new, much more expensive policies at any time.
Let me give you a very personal example:
My family has gold-level, hospital-only cover with insurer Health Partners. (I don’t pay for extras or combined cover, because it’s generally a rip-off for most people.)
Ten years ago, this was one of the best-value products on the market. Actually it was too good – Health Partners have now closed this product to new customers.
And here’s the rub: today, if a new customer wants the same cover as me it would cost them $2,360 more than I’m currently paying per year.
And it’s not just Health Partners that are engaging in this shifty practice. CHOICE recently found that insurers have increased their gold hospital cover by about 31.5% in the past three years, much more than the Government-mandated increases.
Look, private health insurance is intentionally confusing.
There are 26,000 different policies, and so many exclusions and out-of-pocket gotchas that it makes it almost impossible to work out how to get a good deal … which is exactly how the health funds like it.
This explains how they were able to lift their profits by more than 110% in the last financial year (to $2.2 billion) while their customers lived through a cost of living crisis!
So what can you do?
Well, think about whether you actually need private health insurance, for one.
That being said, the Government has a gun to our head and effectively forces 11 million of us to take it out, or smashes us with an extra tax. (And if we wait too long to sign up, we’re slugged with a further penalty based on our age.)
So your only option to save a buck is to consider downgrading your cover. CHOICE did the numbers and found that you could save up to $1,870 by switching your hospital insurance to a cheaper gold, silver or bronze policy – which admittedly limits or totally excludes coverage for childbirth (snip, snip!), knee or hip replacements (no limbo dancing!) or mental illness (stay happy!), among other things.
And when you’re comparing, avoid the churn-and-burn bucket shops like Comparethemarket and iSelect, which only show you policies they get a kickback from. Instead, head to the Government’s search engine Privatehealth.gov.au, which lets you compare every policy on the market.
If Mark Butler really had balls of steel, he’d stop playing political theatre with the health funds and do some serious surgery on the entire industry, because it’s an absolute disgrace.
Tread Your Own Path!