Think about what you currently have insured. Your car. Your home. Maybe the contents inside it. Now think about whether you have insurance for yourself – for your health, your body, your ability to get timely medical treatment when something goes wrong.
For most New Zealanders, the answer is no. Despite the fact that nearly all of us insure our vehicles, research from the Financial Services Council shows that only 37% of Kiwis hold health insurance. We will spend hundreds of dollars a year protecting a depreciating asset on four wheels but leave our own health – the thing that underpins everything else in our lives – unprotected.
There is usually a reason people give – it feels expensive or it feels unnecessary when you’re young and healthy. It feels like something to sort out later, when life gets more complicated. This blog is for anyone who has had that thought – at any age – and wants to understand what they are actually weighing up.
New Zealand has a universal public health system, and for emergencies it works well. If you have a heart attack or break your leg, you will be treated. That is genuinely important and not something to take for granted.
But the public system has two modes: emergency care – which is immediate, and everything else – which increasingly is not. Elective procedures, specialist referrals, diagnostic imaging, planned surgeries – these sit in a queue. And that queue has become very long.
As of early 2025, more than 74,000 New Zealanders were waiting longer than four months just to see a specialist for the first time – before any treatment had even begun. The Government’s own target is for 95% of patients to receive their first specialist assessment or elective treatment within four months. As of early 2026, they were achieving that for just 60% of patients. The waitlist for elective procedures alone sat at over 76,000 people at the end of 2024, with more than 30,000 of them waiting longer than four months.
What does this mean in real life? It means that if you need a knee reconstruction, a suspicious skin lesion investigated, an MRI for ongoing back pain, or a referral to a cardiologist because something doesn’t feel right – you may wait. Not just days but months, sometimes even longer. When you are in pain, worried, or unable to function properly at work or home, waiting is not an ideal experience. Private health insurance is what lets you step out of that queue.
People often think about insurance as something that protects against future, distant risks, and for most types of insurance, that’s true.
Life cover pays out when you die which is important if you have people financially dependent on you, but not something that affects your day-to-day life until that moment. Income protection pays if you are too sick or injured to work for an extended period which is valuable, but generally most relevant once you have income and commitments that depend on it. Trauma cover pays a lump sum if you are diagnosed with a specific serious condition – again a real risk, but a defined and less frequent event.
Health cover is different. It is the insurance that pays out while you are living your life. The knee that gives out during a run at 27. The concerning mole at 31. The persistent headaches that need an MRI at 34. The abdominal pain that requires a specialist and then a procedure at 38. None of these are catastrophic in isolation – but all of them involve cost, waiting, and disruption, and all of them are resolved faster with health cover in place.
A useful way to think about it… A 24-year-old with no mortgage and no dependants probably doesn’t need life cover yet – no one is financially dependent on them. They may not need income protection at the level they will in ten years. But they absolutely might need a specialist consultation, an urgent scan, or a surgical procedure next month. Health cover is the insurance that is relevant from the day you take it out, regardless of your age or life stage. That makes it the logical starting point – and the conversation a financial adviser will almost always begin with when building an insurance plan from scratch.
There are two strong financial reasons to get health cover while you are young and healthy. Most people underestimate both of them.
It costs significantly less when you are young:
Health insurance premiums are calculated based on age and health status. Young adults attract the lowest premiums in the market. A basic hospital plan – covering surgery, specialist consultations, and major diagnostic tests – can cost as little as $40 to $70 per month for someone in their twenties or early thirties. That is roughly $2 a day. The same level of cover for someone in their fifties will cost considerably more. Every year you delay, the entry price increases.
Everything that happens before you apply becomes a pre-existing condition:
When you apply for health insurance, the insurer assesses your health at that point in time. Any condition, injury, or symptom that already exists – or that you have sought advice about – will typically be excluded from your cover. This is one of the most consequential and least understood aspects of how health insurance works in New Zealand.
Why this matters more than it sounds… Imagine you are 30 and have had an intermittent knee problem for a couple of years. You decide to finally get health insurance. That knee is now pre-existing – meaning future knee-related claims are likely excluded from your policy, possibly permanently. If you had taken out cover at 25, before the knee became an issue, it would be covered. The window between being healthy and developing your first health condition is the most valuable time to get insured – and most people don’t act until after it has closed. This is one of the key reasons a financial adviser will encourage clients not to wait. The conversation is much easier – and the resulting cover much broader – when it happens before health history starts to accumulate.
As one NZ insurance specialist puts it: “A lot of people assume health insurance is something you buy after you find out what’s going on. That’s the moment it usually gets harder.”
One of the main reasons people put health insurance off is the belief that it is expensive. And comprehensive cover – the kind that includes GP visits, dental, optical, physiotherapy, and every extra – can be. But that is not what most people need when they are starting out, and it is rarely what a financial adviser will recommend as a first step.
The smarter approach, particularly for younger New Zealanders on a budget, is to think of health cover the way you think of a fire extinguisher: you want it for the things you genuinely cannot handle yourself, not for the things you can manage day to day. That means:
And then pairing that with a higher excess to bring the monthly cost down to something that actually fits your budget.
How the excess works in your favour: An excess is the amount you pay when you make a claim before insurance covers the rest. A higher excess means a lower monthly premium. With an excess of $1,000 to $2,000, a hospital and specialist plan can cost very little month to month – and you are still fully protected against the costs that genuinely hurt: a $15,000 surgery, a $3,000 specialist workup, a $1,200 MRI. Getting the excess level right is not guesswork. It depends on your savings buffer, how often you are likely to need treatment, and what level of out-of-pocket cost you could comfortably absorb. A financial adviser can model this for you specifically – so you are not paying more than you need to, and not left exposed when it matters.
Health cover is the foundation, but it is not the whole picture. As your life becomes more financially complex, other types of insurance become relevant. A financial adviser’s job is to help you understand what you need, when you need it, and in what order – so you are not over-insured at one stage or dangerously exposed at another.
A rough guide to how this typically builds:
The point is not to get everything at once. It is to start with the insurance that is useful right now – which is health cover – and build from there with guidance that reflects your actual situation. That is a very different approach to picking up a policy online and hoping it covers what you need.
Right now, 63% of New Zealanders have no health insurance at all. Many of them are not uninsured because they made a considered decision it wasn’t right for them. They are uninsured because they never quite got around to it, assumed it was too expensive, or decided they’d sort it out later. Later has a habit of arriving with a pre-existing condition attached – and a much harder conversation to have.
Whether you are 24 or 54, whether you feel completely healthy or have been meaning to get sorted for years – the right time to get health cover is before something happens that makes it harder to get. A registered financial adviser is the right person to help you do that properly.
An IFAA registered financial adviser can:
Getting the foundation right makes everything that comes after easier. Talk to an IFAA registered financial adviser today and find out what the right starting point looks like for you.