best health insurance policy for counselling etc

amacca

Hi,

Not sure if this is an appropriate question for this forum (if not apologies/feel free to move)

I'm trying to find out what current private health insurance policies/providers offer the best cover for psychological counselling/psychiatric intervention etc

would anyone here have any idea where I could go to get a relative simple answer for this without trawling through reams of company documentation

again apologise if this is not appropriate, cant see anything in the charter against it, can't see any more appropriate forum but it doest seem to be whats discussed here either.

JuliusCaesar

afaik, there is no health insurance which will cover counselling.

There may be limited access to, for example, treatment by a clinical psychologist for children's problems, but that's about it.

amacca

Oh...O.K. thank you, thats surprising to me, would have thought its a health problem deserving of equal status to something physical and you could insure against it.

d9oiu2wk07blr5

amacca wrote: »

Hi,

Not sure if this is an appropriate question for this forum (if not apologies/feel free to move)

I'm trying to find out what current private health insurance policies/providers offer the best cover for psychological counselling/psychiatric intervention etc

would anyone here have any idea where I could go to get a relative simple answer for this without trawling through reams of company documentation

again apologise if this is not appropriate, cant see anything in the charter against it, can't see any more appropriate forum but it doest seem to be whats discussed here either.

PHI policies do provide varied levels of cover for day to day expenses for pyschiatric care ie, in-patient treatment and day to day expenses like consultant visits and counselling, but it can really depend on the individual policy and whether day to day benefits are included as part of the benefits package. If the illness is pre-existing the policy holder will also be subject to normal waiting periods, which is something the policyholder needs to think about. Insurers can also limit the number of in-patient treatment days. With my own policy it's limited to 180 days per annum and the day to day expenses provides 75% on consultant visits and up to €40 for a max of 8 visits per year. Policyholders also have to incur the initial cost outlay with reimbursement of costs only being at the time of renewal. My advice is to look on the HIA website for the different policies and what they offer. There's also organisations that provide low budget counselling. They are Family Resource Centres and the Bereavement Counselling Service of Ireland. There's also a list of counsellors here (don't know how low cost they are though) http://www.lowcostcounselling.org/ . Some GP's also have counsellors attached to their GP practice.