Hello. I am a little confused about something, and I am hoping you can help. As I am sure most of you know, the privatehealth.gov.au website helps you choose the best hospital and extras cover that suits your needs. It has a pretty handy feature where not only you can sort by cost but also by rankings which can tell you what funds has the lowest cost that will best meet your needs. My question is this. Since Gold Hospital covers every clinical category, what causes a difference to the rankings? Does anyone know? I sent a question to privatehealth direct and all they said is it ranks on how closely they meet your needs which is fine and I get but if gold covers everything what makes 1 gold policy one star and 1 gold policy 5 stars? It is not cost as some 4 star policies are lower cost than some 2 star policies for example. Can anyone help? Thanks in advance
I don’t see star ratings. Would you add where you see star ratings on that site please? I had a go and it returned policies in order of cost (ranking) but I did not see ‘star ratings’.
A tangible difference when comparing gold hospital that might (or might not be relevant to the comparison ranking) is some funds have agreements with more hospitals than others, some have more no-GAP providers, all those being state dependent, excesses vary, and if extras was included in your comparison those policies are not all the same and would reflect differences in how efficacious they might be for your needs. Some funds also require one use their ‘in network providers’ or pay much more for out of network services.
Hi PhilT
This is what I mean (below). My apologies I didnt mean star ratings I mean number of bars. As you can see the bars go from 1 bar to 5 bars. For instance the Gold policy from Australian Unity is cheaper than the fund from Mildura Health fund but Australian Unity gets 5 bars whereas Mildura only gets one bar. I am not comparing Extras so that shouldn’t factor in but your other points may make a difference but I wouldn’t mind knowing how they rate these providers and what makes a difference.
I did a comparison using all defaults and picked one 5, one 2, and one 1 bar at random, left to right.
The differences seem minor at first glance. It anecdotally appears ‘Gold’ requires a minimum list of covered issues but can include additional ones, as can the other tiers. Since gold covers the entire list as presented how differences are accounted for in the presentation is opaque. Did you tick/untick specific conditions for your comparison? If so that might provide more insight?
The other tiers - Silver, Bronze, Basic - can cover additional items in hospital. If they do this then the tier changes to Silver Plus, Bronze Plus, Basic Plus. The Gold tier however already does include all ‘in-hospital’ items. However there can still be differences in price, co-payments, excesses, ambulance cover and availability of gap cover doctors.
Looking at the above screenshot posted by @PhilT it’s possible privatehealth have taken into account at least some of these extra factors (such as gap-cover doctors and ambulance cover) in the ‘Rank match’.
The CHOICE health insurance comparison takes into account all of these features, in addition to the complaints rating for the health fund.
