Major Medical Health Insurance NZ Policies and Plans
In New Zealand, health insurance policies tend to be one of two types: “major medical health insurance” and “comprehensive health insurance”. The difference is quite simple. A major medical health insurance plan is designed to cover the larger medical costs that you could face – for example treatment in private hospital. This type of cost can be very large – tens of thousands of dollars or more – so major medical health insurance focuses on covering these. A comprehensive health insurance plan will usually (though not always) offer cover for large hospital costs, and will also cover smaller costs that can arise – like GP (General Practitioner) visits or prescriptions for example.
In the past, it was common for people to choose comprehensive health insurance NZ, however in recent years, major medical health insurance NZ policies have become much more common. We will looks at some of the reasons why.
A key reason is cost, comprehensive health insurance policies tend to be significantly more expensive, which makes major medical health insurance NZ relatively more affordable. And value is a related reason. When you look closely at the cost of a comprehensive health insurance NZ plan, and compare this with the amount you can actually claim back in the plan’s fine print, you will see that often the extra cost is the same (or more) than the likely maximum you could claim. For this reason insurers often refer to comprehensive New Zealand health insurance plans as “dollar swapping” – which means that you are paying the insurer a sum, which is then paid back to you in claim payments. In this situation a major medical New Zealand health insurance plan offers much better value for money.
A second consideration is that many comprehensive health insurance NZ policies actually offer very poor cover for large medical costs. They are often structured to cover smaller costs like GP (General Practitioner) visits, but their cover for really significant medical bills can be very limited (for example they might only cover a certain percentage, or might have low maximum dollar limits that they will pay). This can make comprehensive health insurance NZ plans quite dangerous – people with this type of plan often assume they will be well covered if there should major treatment ever needed – but are seriously disappointed when they discover the actual amount that their plan will cover. In some cases this can lead to financial difficulty as people need to use savings or even mortgage or sell a house to pay for treatment.
A final reason people these days are more likely to choose major medical health insurance NZ is that this kind of plan follows the insurance guideline of only choosing to insure things that you could not afford to pay for yourself. The concept is that when considering any kind of insurance, it is not worth insuring minor, predictable events, but is better to focus on more unlikely, but potentially catastrophic events. In the example of health insurance, a minor, predictable event that most people could afford to pay for would be a visit to the GP, while a more unlikely, but potentially far more financially serious event would be a major operation.
With LifeDirect buy health insurance policies online and decide which one to choose from its types: Major Medical Health Insurance and Comprehensive Health Insurance. Just go through all the pros and cons of comparing health insurance NZ policies with different and trusted health insurers then select one.
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