Types
There are two broad categories of health insurance in Australia. One is the hospital cover and the other is known as the general treatment cover, also known as ancillary cover or extra cover.
The hospital cover insurance helps with various kinds of expenses related to treatment in the hospital, public or private, such as accommodation, doctors consultation fee. There are various types or levels of hospital cover available that you can choose from. There are some plans that cover all expenses related to treatment in the hospital, while there are some other plans for which you pay a lower premium requires you to make a part payment against the entire hospital bill, such as in case of specified or unspecified co-payment cover. You have the choice to further reduce your premium by agreeing for a limited coverage for some medical conditions, as in case of restricted benefit cover or even agree not to be covered at all for some conditions, as in exclusionary cover.
General treatment cover or extra cover take care of costs related to additional medical conditions such as dental care, optical care, physiotherapy cover, ambulance cover, pharmaceutical cover, chiropractic cover, etc. It also includes expenses related to general disease management or illness prevention programs. If you include them in your health insurance plan, the premium that you have to pay will be more with each addition of extra cover.
Most health insurance companies provide packaged products wrapped in different kinds of policies that include specified hospital and extra cover combined or the two covers separately to its members.