{"id":634751,"date":"2026-10-18T23:42:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-18T23:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/634751\/"},"modified":"2026-10-18T23:42:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-18T23:42:10","slug":"private-health-insurance-major-hcf-says-soaring-mental-health-claims-driving-up-top-tier-premiums","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/634751\/","title":{"rendered":"Private health insurance major HCF says soaring mental health claims driving up top-tier premiums"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The chief executive of one of the country\u2019s biggest private health insurers says the soaring cost of mental health claims is driving up the price of top-tier gold cover to unsustainable levels, triggering an exodus of people into cheaper plans.<\/p>\n<p>Lorraine Thomas, the chief executive of HCF, which has 2.1 million members, said mental health claims accounted for 90 per cent of the fund\u2019s gold-tier claims, with the average benefit paid for overnight private mental health admissions costing more than $15,500.<\/p>\n<p>Loading&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The chief executive of one of the country\u2019s biggest private health insurers says the soaring cost of mental&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":634752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[134,554,555,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-634751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=634751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/634752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}