Basic Extras Cover

Just like hospital insurance, extras policies are offered by health funds in three varying levels of cover designed to suit different life stages. While comprehensive and medium extras policies are more relevant to those who are older or who have families, basic extras is aimed at people with low health care requirements such as young, healthy singles and couples

This article will focus on the basic level of extras cover by looking in detail at how much cover it provides, who it is best suited to, its exclusions and which Australian health funds offer it.

Compare basic extras cover offered by Australian health funds

What level of protection does basic extras cover provide?

• As the title implies, basic extras cover provides only a basic level of cover. This means it only covers a limited number of ancillary services and the benefit limits payable for those services are much lower than those offered by medium and comprehensive extras cover.
• Basic policies also often combine benefit limits for several services (e.g. physiotherapy, chiropractic, massage and natural therapies), unlike comprehensive and medium policies, which typically offer separate benefit limits for individual services. The disadvantage of this is that you can quickly use up your annual benefit limit in just a few visits to a handful of service providers.
• If you have a family with high ancillary health care needs, or you use one particular service more frequently than others, you might be better off taking out medium or comprehensive cover rather than just a basic policy.

Who is basic extras health cover suited to?

Basic extras policies tend to only cover medical services such as:

• General dental
• Preventative dental
• Physiotherapy
• Optical (although this depends heavily on the provider)

Therefore it is more suited to those who are young and healthy and who don’t have need for a high level of ancillary cover. For example, if you only go to the dentist for teeth cleaning or the odd filling, basic cover may be all you need, but if you require more complex dental procedures such as bridgework then medium or comprehensive cover may be a much better choice.

Because Medicare does not cover any of these ancillary services, some form of extras cover is normally required. But if you don’t use these services a lot, then basic extras provides the ideal entry level cover to ensure you’re not paying more than you need to.

Are there any exclusions?

Basic extras cover also excludes a wide variety of ancillary services for which a benefit will not be paid. These include:

Which providers offer basic extras cover?

The following are the basic extras policies offered by some of Australia’s leading health funds:

Anything else to be aware of with basic extras cover?

The following are some additional points that you should be aware of when comparing basic extras cover:

• Waiting periods. Most ancillary services have waiting periods before benefits will be paid. These are usually two months, but if you’re switching from another fund, many insurers will often waive these waiting periods.
• Benefit limits. As mentioned previously, separate benefit limits are preferable to combined limits. Some insurers also offer percentage benefits (usually from 60% to 100%), which can be better than dollar amounts, particularly if the provider charges more than the average fee.
• Preferred providers. Many funds use a network of preferred service providers. The advantage of this is that the provider charges an agreed fee, meaning there may be no gap to pay. The disadvantage could be that there may be no provider close to where you live, so it pays to check with the fund before taking out cover.

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