The advertisements made it look so attractive: smiling children in the arms of their doting parents, puppy dogs chasing balls through a green pasture and grey-haired grandfathers smiling kindly in rocking chairs.
But the clever marketing images that encouraged my wife and I to fork out thousands of dollars for the 'security and convenience' of private heath insurance were nothing like the reality. In fact, it quickly turned into a nightmare.
In the first year of the policy, my wife made a few claims for minor ailments. Each claim we made was met with weeks of deathly silence from the insurance company: the same company that had been so helpful in relieving us of our premium money earlier.
When I would finally ring the company to ask how the claim was progressing, they would say ominously they 'were making further inquiries'. If you think that sounds like something the police might say when investigating a crime, you would be right. I felt the company was casting itself as a fearless investigator while I was the cunning criminal attempting to hoodwink them.
I was nothing of the sort. I was a fit and healthy individual who had paid a lot of money for insurance protection I clearly was not getting. Then the letters from the insurer started to arrive - both to my wife and I, and our doctors - asking for further details of our medical history. I quickly gathered what they were attempting to do: they were building a case against us using the favourite catch-all of the insurance industry - the 'pre-existing condition'.
If they could argue the expenses we were claiming involved a pre-existing condition, they would not be liable to pay. Every health insurance policy has clauses covering pre-existing conditions. I did not realise it at the time that the one I had signed meant every illness including a common cold could be interpreted as a pre-existing condition: if they could have blamed a current illness on something I had picked up in kindergarten, I am sure they would have.
