HEALTH INSURANCE COVER


HEALTH INSURANCE COVER

Two different kinds of private health insurance are available in Australia: coverage for hospital related expenses and coverage for medical expenses which are not a component of hospitalisation and are not otherwise covered by medicare. The latter cover is referred to as 'ancillary cover'.

There was no marked difference between the proportion of people with Profound/severe disability and those without a disability who had Hospital cover only, 6.3% and 8.0% respectively. A very small proportion of people with Profound/severe disability had Ancillary cover only, (1.3%), compared to 4% of people without a disability. The disparity between the proportion of those with both hospital and ancillary cover was wider: 27.9% of people with Profound/severe disability, compared to 42.4% of people without a disability (Graph 26).

Of people with Profound/severe disability, the leading reason for not being covered by private health insurance was "Cannot afford it/too expensive" (47.2%), compared to 24.0% of people with no disability. Other reasons for people with Profound/severe disability were that they had a Pensioner/Veteran's Affairs/health concession card (10.3%) and Medicare cover was sufficient (9.8%) (Graph 27).

Of people with Profound/severe disability, 73.3% reported having some form of Government health concession card in the 2007-08 NHS compared to 20.5% of people without a disability (Graph 28).

Graph 29 further examines people who have a Government health concession card by age. While people with disability generally had greater access to Government health concession cards than people without disability, there was an increasing tendency to obtain these concession cards the older people became. Of people aged 65 years or more who were profoundly or severely disabled, 95% reported having a health concession card in the 2007-08 NHS.