Health Insurance

Health Insurance is a type of insurance coverage that protects your health in case an unexpected medical situation arises. It typically pays surgical, medical, and other health-related expenses incurred by the insured. Health insurance can reimburse the insured for expenses incurred or pay the hospital or treatment provider directly.

Private Health Insurance allows you to have access to private hospital treatment, which means that you won’t need to be a part of the public hospital waiting list. It also means that you have more treatment options and specialists you can choose from.

The New Zealand Public Health System is excellent for emergencies and sorts them out very quickly and efficiently. Where it falls down is with elective surgeries, tests, scans, and surgeries for things that are not deemed as an emergency. Health insurance gives you peace of mind in two main areas:

1. Much shorter waiting lists

When a health complication is in its early stages, it’s often difficult for a doctor to diagnose the level of its severity, as they are almost always working with limited information based on visual and physical symptoms.

Doctors typically will refer you for further follow-up and testing to find out more information on your health complications. This is where things can go wrong if you don’t have health insurance, as at this point, you often get put on a public hospital waiting list as you wait for further treatment or tests.

Public hospital waiting lists can be 4 to 18 months long before getting treatment. According to a survey by TNS research, waiting lists for elective surgeries at New Zealand’s public hospitals average 304 days. An increasing number of people are now waiting over a year. Half of New Zealanders surveyed believe waiting lists will become even longer over the next 10 years. This fear is reasonable. As New Zealand grows, hospitals will have to serve more people, and as our population ages, treatment loads will increase. Will DHB funding and resources keep up with demand? History suggests not.

Such long waiting times is risky if you are not sure of the severity of your conditions, because many things can change in your body over such a long time.

The risk you take with relying solely on the public health system is yours. Still, if you want more control over your health and the speed of getting answers and progressing treatment forward at pace, you can only get that peace of mind through having an excellent health insurance policy in place.

With health insurance, you can avoid all these problems by going directly to private hospitals for treatment, with the cost covered by your insurance provider. If you choose the right health insurance cover, you can get treated within 30 days.

We specialise in finding the right insurer for you, with the lowest market prices. This is all free to you. Neither we, nor the policy providers, add any extra cost or hidden fees.

2. Better treatment & options

Choosing the right health insurance cover means you can claim for 100% of private hospitalisation, treatments, tests, scans, and non-funded drugs (subject to their policy wording).

But choosing correctly is very important, because many non-funded drugs are not covered under most policies. Non-funded drugs are simply ones that the government does not subsidise. Unfortunately, this is a large number. The IQVIA report, commissioned by Medicines New Zealand, ranked New Zealand last for both access to funded medicines, and for pharmaceutical investment overall.

The report showed 304 modern medicines funded internationally between 2011–17 by countries such as the US, UK and Germany. Only 17 were funded in New Zealand.

Not many policies cover non-funded drugs. Only 3 insurers offer it. This is important if you need access to expensive treatments that are available across the world, but not funded under our public health system. You need to choose your policy really carefully, because the cost of having this cover is tiny compared to the cost of the drugs.