The bad news is that private health insurance premiums are on the rise. The good news is that the rise isn’t over the top. While the price to insure against a poor health service could help keep inflation from falling quickly, the actual hike isn’t as bad as it could be.

Like governments before them, the Albanese Government went into negotiations with Private Healthcare Australia, which wanted a 6% rise but ended up getting agreement for a lift in premiums by 3.03% on average. However, NIB quickly put up its premiums by 4.1%, so depending on your insurer, you could be in for a little shock.

The rise is portrayed as reasonable by Health Minister Mark Butler. “While we know that any increase will be hard to bear during a global cost-of-living crunch, the Albanese government has ensured that health insurance premiums will fall relative to Australians’ wages,” Josh Butler of guardian.com reports.

On the other hand, the Minister recognised the recent years of record profits, inferring why he argued for a rise closer to 3%, rather than the 6% that the industry wanted.

And those record profits, helped by the last premium hike, has resulted in NIB’s share price rising by over 15% since last March, which is often when we hear about the latest slug to our private health insurance premiums.

In April last year, insurers were granted a 2.9% rise. See below to check out what happened to its share price chart.

NIB share price (one year)

And 3.43% of that 15% share price rise came yesterday after hearing the news that premiums were on the rise.

In their defence, NIB’s historically successful CEO, Mark Fitzgibbon, who also is the brother of former Labor long-serving politician Joel Fitzgibbon, pointed to the fact that it’s not all take from his company.

He explained some of the rises to The Guardian saying that “…the return of hospital and ancillary treatment post Covid-19 and a rise in health and medical treatment costs” had bumped up costs, om top of higher wages.

“Fitzgibbon denied insurers were ‘sitting back passively responding to inflationary pressure by just lifting premiums’, pointing out that NIB offered health and wellbeing programs as well as other health management.

Clearly, it’s time for customers of private health insurance to have a new look at what they’re paying. The Guardian gave us this table below that shows some funds haven’t opted for rises yet, while others, such as Peoplecare Health, have gone for lower hikes.

The news should get anyone concerned about how they can afford health insurance to look at comparison websites, such as Compare the Market, Compare Club and others.

That exercise should encourage all of us to start looking for ways to save money on all our outlays.