definitely not something to use to make your decision on - i agree - i'd be leaning more towards the lifetime cover as being the important thing - you might know what your health is like now, but 10 or 15 years from now, you could have a completely different life/lifestyle/health issues - and having to pay additional on top of that cover based on the age you enter PHI - it can be a huge difference... even if you have the most basic hospital cover by the time you turn 30, it will keep you paying the premiums of a 30 year old for life... we're seeing the impact of this in that DH wasn't covered before he turned 30 so we pay extra for him....

couple of years ago we both had dental surgery and got over 13k of value just from those two ops - so i am still thinking we're ahead!

ooh, and DH's income has been in the region that applies to that higher medicare rebate more than once the last couple of years - what we've paid in PHI has pretty much been negated by what he would have had to pay for that... and we've gotten value for it

another thing to keep in mind, and i think this is something that does apply to some people - is what public services you have locally - we only really have two, maybe three, public hospitals within 100k's of here and the waiting lists are appalling (my mum had to wait over a year for surgery to correct multiple hernias that left her incapable of moving half the time due to the pain) - i understand why her and dad dropped PHI due to finance (she is on pension) - but it's made me more aware of the advantages of being able to access the local private hospital (which is closer than the others anyway!) with such a short wait time.