What’s continuous cover?
When you get Hospital cover for the first time after you turn 31, an extra cost called the Lifetime Health Cover (LHC) loading gets added to your premium.
To avoid paying this loading (or a higher one) in the future, you need to maintain your Hospital cover without any long breaks. This is known as continuous cover.
For anyone paying the LHC, the good news is that maintaining continuous cover for 10 years will remove it from your premium.
There’s also some flexibility in what counts as ‘continuous cover’. You can have short breaks in your Hospital cover – up to 1,094 days (just under three years in total) over your lifetime when you won’t need to pay the loading after the break.
Continuous cover only relates to the LHC loading. If you cancel your Hospital cover you may have to wait again before you can claim for some things when you rejoin.
When do breaks in cover count towards the 1,094 days?
| Reason for break | Does it count? |
|---|---|
| Cancelling your Hospital cover | Yes |
| Switching between health funds: | |
| With gap in days covered | Yes |
| Without gap in days covered | No |
| Suspending your hospital cover: | |
| While travelling overseas | No |
| For financial reasons | No |
| Cancelling your cover while living overseas: | |
| Being overseas for at least one continuous year | No |
| Visiting Australia for up to 90 days while living overseas | No |
| Visiting Australia for more than 90 days | Yes |