Robust health cover plans for EVERY budget
Want the best-value plans for your needs? We’ve got your back!
Health cover hikes have hit nearly two and a half million people hard in the last year. Literally half of Ireland has been left reeling as every insurer upped its prices again and again with some plans going up in price by as much as 20%, well above the level of inflation.
Last week we suggested alternative plans for the 150,000 people who will have to find new policies after a major shakeup of the VHI’s suite of plans, focusing on the impending retirement of its mainstay offering Plan B Options.
This week we follow this up by asking leading health insurance experts at Totalhealthcover.ie (part of the Lockton group) to recommend the best value plans to suit all pockets.
Many thirtysomethings took out cheap deals for around the prices listed here just to avoid being penalised for their age when Lifetime Community Rating (LCR) was introduced in 2015.
Since then, anyone aged 35 or above has to pay an extra 2% for each year above the age of 34 when they didn’t have health insurance.
They didn’t care about the benefits. And it’s just as well as there were none – apart from avoiding LCR penalties and paying for care in public hospitals we’re entitled to anyway. But that was nearly 10 years ago and if these people haven’t switched since then, many of those original plans doubled in price so they could be paying twice as much. Yet, similar new plans are now on the market at 2015 prices! They could thus avoid all of the health cover hikes since then. Dermot Goode here recommends three of them – one from each insurer, Laya, Irish Life Health (ILH) and VHI. These plans are great value compared to similar options costing twice as much. Yet just grabbing the cheapest deal is far from the best option as even the best only offer the most basic cover.
These are a big step up from the cheapest plans in price as well as benefits. Private hospitals are covered – but only fully covered for multi-occupancy beds. There are a lot of excesses once you go beyond that.
However, there’s a decent range of outpatient benefits on which you could claim back 50%, such as GP visits, physios, consultants and vaccinations.
The VHI option here gives 12 visits to its ‘VHI 360’ health clinics and other benefits not included with the other two but it doesn’t include employee assistance programmes (EAP), whereas Laya and ILH do at this level. If you play your cards right, you could trade up from the cheaper plans to one of these and not lose any money – just by making sure to claim all the outpatient benefits, some of which are optional.
CORPORATE PLANS
Corporate plans are the deals offered to company clients that have all the bells and whistles, and tend to be better value – if you’re prepared to pay slightly more.
These plans offer all of the above benefits plus a few more and with far fewer and lower ‘excesses’. You get things like fertility benefits and all offer EAP services. ILH has a nice option of personalised packages where you can get cover for things like gyms and fitbits, and lots more, depending on your choice. a great price, these are the corporate plans for you. They include everything previously mentioned plus lower excesses and – in the case of VHI and ILH – 75% back
on routine expenses. Simply Connect (and its slightly dearer sister plan Simply Connect Plus) give back only 50% on routine expenses. But more importantly these are among very few plans left at this level that fully cover key cardiac, eye and joint procedures – such as the hip and knee replacements that many of us will unfortunately require as we grow older.