Do you reckon form insurance within Australia is worth it?

Or are public hospitals just as good?
Answers:
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Definately worth it - my parents are both on private cover and when my mum required a hip replacement it happen within a fortnight - under medicare you would be waiting 2 years at lowest. Thats 2 years in pain, not person able to play bowls (my mums greatest concern) just waiting for your number to come up. Private patients hold little or no waiting times.
For nation who really believe that private hospitals are better than the public health system, I think they should have a feeling free to use them and therefore may want health insurance to backing cover those costs.

However, I am not one of those people. I think that the public system is slightly satisfactory and it deserves our advocacy.

Irrespective of this, if you have the money you are immaculately entitled to be a private patient (in a private or public hospital) if you choose, whether or not you have vigour (hospital) insurance. It just means that you won't hold a private fund that you can make a claim against.

Having said that, most people who fan private treatment do not realise that when you are treated as a private patient and do not have a fund to bar the costs for you, you can still make a claim with medicare to be reimbursed some of the costs. The amount reimbursed will be base on the medicare scheduled fee, and as you would expect only applies to services that medicare has an item number for.

This is no different to visit a GP or specialist who refuses to bulk bill. You take your bill to medicare, and they will reimburse you a proportion (usually 75-85% of the schedule fee) and you carry the remaining cost.

Further, in attendance are a couple of medicare thresholds which apply when you're medical expenses exceed certain levels. One relates to puncture payments (the portion between the schedule fee and the amount medicare typically reimburses) and the other relates to out of pocket expenses (any expenses over and above the schedule fee).

You have to be pretty sick (or own a lot of sick dependants) for these thresholds to kick within, but it's still excellent that they are available.

Unlike private funds, medicare doesn't place a maximum amount that they will reimburse you in any given year. In fact, underneath medicare, the more your medical expenses are, the more medicare will end up paying (due to the thresholds mentioned above).

It bothers me that many, heaps, taxpayers are members of private funds purely because of the medicare levy surcharge and the lifetime healthcover rules. This gives the vigour funds a captive audience, to the extent that I think that population who have "extras" cover are being subsidised by those near hospital cover. Next time you receive information from your health fund telling you how much surrounded by every dollar is paid out in benefits, giving a breakdown, you'll see that for hospital cover just fund members, a very big part of your contribution goes towards funding benefits that are not available to you!

So, it's not really a query of whether health insurance is worth it because market forces are not really permitted to want. Fund memberships are artificially propped up by people who have done their maths and enjoy worked out that it's going to cost them more in medicare levy surcharge than it will to pay for the lowest expensive hospital cover available, but might otherwise be happy to be covered purely by medicare. That's not much of a choice.

Personally, I believe that Medicare is one of the best things that our federal government provides because it's available to everyone - not a short time ago the wealthy and not just the extremely poor, and I don't want to see it eroded. There seem to be a prevailing belief that by discouraging people from using the public health system, this somehow help it. It won't. That's the kind of logic that leads to services human being reduced "due to lack of utilisation".

I would like to see a public robustness system that even people who can afford to go private will want to use, purely by choice. And if almost everyone uses it, why should anyone feel bitter about their tax dollars supporting it? And of course, everyone (rich or poor) should settle the same price, which again is not what happens when the private system is utilised. By increasing the use of the public system near will be strong political motivation to ensure that it's well funded and maintained for the benefit of everyone.

What's going on with health insurance would be analogous to the fire brigade individual segregated into public and private sectors. We adjectives benefit from having the fire brigade available. Whether our house is the one burning down or not, we like to know that we can christen on the fire brigade to spring into action and that our taxes ensure that this service is available to us. We don't pay a excise depending on how big the fire is or how big our house is or what have you. The fire brigade does it's best to help everyone equally. We don't be aware of a need to call on a private fire brigade that will charge us more money to do like peas in a pod job and sends us silly leaflets in the communication or extinguishes fires exclusively with holy water while they set us up near a deck chair and a colour tv to watch, and subsequently we don't entail to subscribe to special insurance to try and offset those (potential) costs. Yet this is effectively what we are doing to our health system.

It's ridiculous!


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