Hospital cover can help pay for treatments that require you to go to hospital, like knee surgery or cancer treatment. Here are some of the key benefits of hospital cover:
Extras cover takes care of all the services that can be done out of hospital, like dental, physio and prescription glasses. Here are some of the key benefits of extras cover:
If you don't want or need hospital or extras health insurance, it might still be worth taking out ambulance-only health insurance. Outside of Queensland and Tasmania, Ambulance services aren't covered by Medicare or state governments. Ambulance cover is available from around $1.50 a week, and will cover you for unexpected emergency trips.
| Response | 75+ yrs | 65-74 yrs | 55-64 yrs | 45-54 yrs | 35-44 yrs | 25-34 yrs | 18-24 yrs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Combined | 45.45% | 29.07% | 34.16% | 32.54% | 40.54% | 23.68% | 31.76% |
| Hospital | 36.36% | 34.3% | 32.3% | 32.54% | 36.76% | 48.42% | 49.41% |
| Extras | 34.09% | 34.3% | 37.27% | 29.59% | 36.76% | 45.79% | 37.65% |
| None | 29.55% | 30.81% | 27.33% | 28.99% | 18.92% | 15.79% | 10.59% |
| Ambulance cover | 20.45% | 22.67% | 21.12% | 21.3% | 16.76% | 15.26% | 17.65% |
If you're looking for cheap hospital cover for tax, you might want to avoid Basic tier policies and start with at least Bronze cover. It's just a few dollars more per month, and actually offers some coverage. Basic cover isn't required to fully cover any treatments, so it's generally not going to be very useful.
Here are some Bronze tier policies from Finder partners. All of these will exempt you from the Medicare Levy Surcharge (MLS) and the Lifetime Health Cover loading (LHC). All prices are based on a single individual with less than $97,000 income and living in Sydney.
The Finder Score ranks every health policy in our database on value for money. We updated this monthly with data provided by Ombudsman.
We consider the 38 hospital treatment categories, plus the covered extras categories and the total extras benefit. We also use the average price for each product. Here's the breakdown of factors we consider.
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