What you need to know
- Excess skin removal is covered in some Silver Plus and Gold policies.
- The table below lists some policies from Finder partners that cover excess skin removal.
- Policies start from around $169.48 per month.
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Excess skin removal is covered in some Silver Plus and Gold policies. The table below lists some policies from Finder partners that cover excess skin removal, typically with a 12 month waiting period.
Medicare will cover your skin removal but only if it considers it medically-necessary. To get approved, you need to meet all of the following conditions:
Yes, you can get cover for medically-necessary skin removal through private health insurance too. The benefits of going through private health insurance are the following:
To have your excess skin removal covered through private insurance, you'll have to meet the following criteria:
When you lose weight, your skin will attempt to bounce back into shape due to a property called skin elasticity. If you end up with too much loose skin, it means your skin couldn't bounce back fast enough.
Maybe your skin lost some of its elasticity over time (due to age, sun exposure, being stretched for so long and other factors). Or maybe your weight loss was so rapid, even the most elastic skin couldn't keep up. It could be a little of both.
Either way, many people will end up with some amount of loose skin if they were significantly overweight before and have since shed a bunch of kilos.
You can try to minimise excess skin by losing weight gradually and giving your skin the opportunity to slowly work itself back into shape.
Lifting weights as part of your weight loss regime could also help in some cases. The new muscle mass will replace some of the lost fat mass, meaning less skin will come loose in the first place.
If that doesn't work and you end up with a lot of loose skin, here are your options if you want to have it removed:
To remove excess skin, your surgeon will make incisions into the area where the excess skin is located, lift the skin from the underlying tissue, trim it off, reposition the navel if necessary and stitch up the wound.
If liposuction is required, the process is the same except they'll remove the excess fat before trimming away the skin. They do this by hollowing out little spaces within the fatty tissue. After they trim the skin and stitch the wound, they'll give you a compression garment that will collapse these hollowed-out spaces to create a contoured body shape.
In the case of a tummy tuck, the process is again the same, but your surgeon will stitch together any loose or separated abdominal muscles prior to removing the fat.
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