I've had health insurance for 20 years. First with VHI, then latterly with Aviva on the advice of a financial consultant. I don't know how bureaucratic Aviva is compared with other companies, but all my experience of having been ill has been with them. Baroque, Byzantine, and Kafkaesque is how I would describe them. When very ill, I wasn't up to gathering the paperwork for them at all. There is no allowance made that people claiming are necessarily sick. And being a single person I don't have anyone who could do this for me.
The next claim I made was for an amount in the region of €2200, various consultant visits (out-patients) and a couple of procedures. The reimbursement? €115. The difficulty was that I had seen a number of different consultants, rather than the same one and so there was a new excess each time. The fact that is was for the same problem made no difference.
Roll on to the present:
GP wants to refer me for a colonoscopy, so asks me to phone Aviva to find out what I'm covered for.
Aviva can't tell me because they need the name of the consultant, and the procedure code.
Back to the GP, she still can't write the letter as she doesn't know if the consultant is covered, and she also doesn't have a list of procedure codes for each health insurance company; but she can give me a list of consultants she would refer to.
Back to Aviva. They still can't give me the procedure code for a colonoscopy as they "aren't medically trained"!!! They can however tell me if the consultants are registered with them. All are. Some are "fully participating", some are "public only", some are "public, private and high technology hospital". I'm still not sure what "public only" means, I still don't know if I'm covered for a colonoscopy because I don't have the code.
I have to ring the consultants for the code. But it's now almost 7pm, and this has taken up a large part of my day, and away from the stuff I do daily in order to scrape together the €251 per month that I pay Aviva, so that they can do their damnedest to ensure I do not /cannot claim anything back.
So: why do I have health insurance?
I don't know.
If I had saved the 251 for the last 5 years (a total of €15,000), I'd have cheerfully paid up/gone public and still be quids in. Instead, I've torn out my hair, wasted my time and energy, made numerous phone calls to unfortunates in call centres, and been put under a lot of stress.