How necessary is health insurance?

moonlightreader

I'm 23 years old. Perfectly healthy. Ive got no plans to have a family or anything anytime soon. I've got no debts, I've also got no savings. I currently have private insurance with aviva, it costs about e50 a month. Could I get rid of it and rely on the public health system. Been paying for a year and a half and I've never claimed, is it really worth while? Would it be better to save the e600 a year.

Any thoughts appreciated.

Thanks.

homer911

Lots of people manage without it - its a personal choice

seamus

Where it comes in useful is long-term illness or injury. If you have an accident, you'll go into A&E and queue with the rest of the plebs, with or without insurance. However, if you require longer-term care or additional treatments after this, your insurance comes in handy because you can get treated quicker and use private hospitals.

Under 35, and assuming you have no existing complaints and are reasonably healthy (i.e. not 5 stone overweight), you're unlikely to need much more than a few stitches or a bone in plaster in any given year. Even these are unlikely. The key though is that buying insurance doesn't help *after* you get sick, so as the risk of getting sick increases, insurance may be a good idea even if you're perfectly fine.

broker2008

I think I gave a view on a previous post on this subject. Basically the health system will probably look after you adequately if you are very sick. Where health insurance comes in is possibly to skip queues where there is a wait on the public system and you visit a consultant privately. The cost of this visit won't be fully covered by health insurance. Usually a portion of the cost could be covered, I say could be because there is usually an outpatient excess that has to be reached, eg €250 for an individual for a person on Plan B with VHI. Even though the private consultant might charge say €200, only a portion of this would usually go against the excess say €50 odd so there would be no refund from VHI if that was the only claim. However the visit to the consultant may mean an earlier diagnosis of something which can then be cared for on an inpatient basis which could save your life etc etc. The other aspect is the type of accommodation that you are looking for were you to be unlucky enough to get sick and need hospital treatment. The hospitals will be glad to see you if you have health insurance as they can charge the insurance company for the overnight stays but there is still no guarantee that you will get the accommodation that your particular plan may entitle you to. There is always the option to add gp cover where you can either add on, combine or buy a standalone product that will give money back for visits to your gp, physio, dentist etc.

You are probably on either me plan or i plan level 1 as a starter plan and upgrade as you get older to more comprehensive cover. Level 1 Hospital or Level 1 Everyday could be good alternative which are new or Essential Starter or First Plan from Quinn or VHI.

Patrickof

What about in relation to kids? We have three young kids (6, 2 and 2) insured with Quinn and its costing about 500 in total for them per annum. I believe that kids get equal treatment (i.e. public care is the same as private) in the event of requiring treatment (with the exception of the accommodation type).

So, is it necessary or useful to have it for kids?

Toots

From what I understand, it's pretty useless for kids. There's no private children's hospital in Ireland, so it's not going to make a difference whether or not they have health insurance.

zokrez

Sure none of us will need health insurance once Fine Gael get into government and introduce the Universal Health System !

Toots

Lets keep the politics out of this guys!

Dub13

Patrickof wrote: »

What about in relation to kids? We have three young kids (6, 2 and 2) insured with Quinn and its costing about 500 in total for them per annum. I believe that kids get equal treatment (i.e. public care is the same as private) in the event of requiring treatment (with the exception of the accommodation type).

So, is it necessary or useful to have it for kids?

Its a scam when it comes to kids as they are rightly seen on a needs bases.

In the last few weeks my father has had to get a couple of stints put in,he has been paying VHI for most of his life and this is the first time he has needed it.To be honest it was not worth paying into as he got nothing and I mean nothing done differently or faster than a public patient.