More Australians see health insurance’s value | Insurance Business Australia
Life & Health
More Australians see health insurance’s value
Report covers figures related to hospital treatment and extras cover
Life & Health
By Roxanne Libatique
More Australians are seeing the value of health insurance, with the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s (APRA) latest data showing an increasing number of private health insurance (PHI) members.
From June to September 2023, the number of people with cover for hospital treatment ballooned by 89,000. Meanwhile, the number of people with extras cover for services such as dental, optical, and physio rose by 86,000.
Members…
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Why health insurance inflation is hard to measure
Health insurance prices are a tricky thing for economists to quantify.
The BLS doesn’t measure direct consumer costs such as monthly premiums. That’s because those premiums don’t buy the same quality of insurance. Benefits and risk factors vary from policy to policy, for example.
“Price change between health plans of varying quality cannot be compared, and any quality adjustment methods to facilitate price comparison would be difficult and subjective,” according to a BLS fact sheet.
Instead, the agency measures health insurance inflation based indirectly partly…