Even in the face of a painful morning workout, we can all appreciate the benefits of staying active!
Despite the upsides, however, anyone who is ‘fighting fit’ is going to be susceptible to injury. Most sport-related injuries are relatively minor, but some can pose more significant problems, especially if left untreated.
So, let’s have a look at how you can use a product like health insurance to treat some of the most common sporting injuries.
While you’ll likely be taken to a public hospital in an emergency, private hospital cover can help pay for in-hospital rehabilitation, and let you choose your specialist (i.e. experts in treating your particular injury) if you decide to be treated in a private hospital once you’ve had your injury diagnosed. Also, extras cover helps pay for out of hospital services like physiotherapy and remedial massages.
In short, both types of insurance can be ideal in helping you recover from serious injury. Let’s look at each type of cover in a bit more detail, though.
This type of insurance helps pay for your treatment as a private patient in a hospital. It has two main benefits: firstly, it enables you to avoid public waiting lists for surgeries and procedures. As such, if you have elective surgery that will help you get back to 100% fitness, hospital cover (in most cases) helps you get seen to faster than the public system. The second benefit is that you can choose your own doctor or specialist. This comes in handy if your particular injury would benefit from a specific specialist, which you can select.
Some healthcare services undertaken outside of a hospital aren’t covered by either Medicare or private hospital cover. If you want a product that will contribute towards the cost of services like physiotherapy, remedial massage, podiatry or dietetics, you’ll need to consider extras cover.
In Queensland and Tasmania, emergency transportation costs are covered by your state or territory government. For everyone else, ambulance cover is an essential purchase. Without it, you could be left out of pocket to the tune of hundreds or thousands of dollars if you require an ambulance – especially if you’re far from the nearest public hospital.
As you can see above, taking out health insurance for sports injuries covers much more than just a rolled ankle. Ambulance cover at the very least is critical protection for many Australians. That being said, there are many other ailments and situations where these products come in handy.
According to the latest AIHW report on Hospital care for Australian sports injury, a number of common injuries resulted in hospitalisations.
So, how well would health insurance cover the costs for either the initial treatment of these injuries, or your rehabilitation efforts?
Well, let’s dismiss one thing straight away: health insurance isn’t needed for superficial cuts and scrapes. Go to a GP or a public emergency room, get stitched up, and you’re good to go! Head injuries should be seen by a doctor as soon as possible, though. Better still, go straight to a public emergency room.
If you’re unlucky to suffer from any of the other above injuries though, there’s more to consider.
Say you roll your ankle badly, maybe tear your anterior cruciate ligament (a widespread occurrence as of 2015, especially in young Australians, according to the Medical Journal of Australia). You may require follow-up surgery, but it won’t be considered medically urgent in the proceeding 48 hours – meaning it’s considered ‘elective’. Through the public system, you might wait a month or more for surgery. In the private system, it may only be a few days.
Now let’s consider something much more serious, like a spinal cord injury. The road to recovery for such an incident can be long and expensive:
“The average acute-care cost of the first acute admission record for a cervical spinal cord injury was $67,523 … the highest of any type of sport-related injury analysed in the report. A thoracic-lumbosacral SCI was the second most expensive type of sport-related injury, at an average cost of $37,797 per person.”
AIHW, 2015-16
The length of initial care can be between 90 days and 37 weeks. With private hospital cover, it may be better to undertake such care in a private room (should one be available) or to utilise certain specialists.
Regardless of your cover, it’s important to work with your doctor and allied health care professionals when recovering to ensure you don’t make the injuries any worse.
Sports injuries can slow us down, and it can be hard leaving enough time to fully recover before we want to get back out there and stay active.
As such, don’t short change yourself when it comes to more options for healthcare.
At the very least, compare different health insurance policies and see what it costs; you might be surprised at how affordable it can be.
Best of all, finding policies that are (a) great value and (b) cover services that relate to your level of activity couldn’t be easier when you use our comparison service. Try it out today!
