Southern Cross CEO Peter Tynan argues how much an insurer pays out in claims in more important than the dollar limit it’ll pay up to on interest.co.nz. This is in response to another article on interest.co.nz which compared what you get for your money when it comes to health insurance.
Here is what Tynan had to say:
“There are hundreds of different types of health insurance policies available in New Zealand, which can make it hard to know which policy suits you best – particularly when you don’t know what you might end up using your health insurance to cover.
Comparison websites for example often place emphasis on the dollar amount that policies will cover up to, like $300,000 per year for surgical procedures. But really this tells a very small part of the story. These upper limits are illusionary benefits for consumers. As the largest most experienced health insurer, we’ve never had a claim close to $200,000 let alone $300,000.
In the last two years Southern Cross has funded 362,000 surgical procedures and just four members had a surgical claim above $100,000. Even though these four claims account for just 0.001% of all those paid – this $100,000 limit is frequently touted as insufficient and a major downside of Southern Cross policies. For this reason alone, the business is considering increasing it.
We set our limits based on industry knowledge. We pay 72% of the country’s health insurance claims, so we have a significant amount of data on what healthcare actually costs and what people actually claim for. Our policy benefits and limits are constructed with this knowledge in mind.”
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