This week I had a call from one of my successful real estate clients, who I had given some ACC advice to and put some insurances in place for about five months ago. She explained to me that although she didn’t take out medical insurance initially, she has to have it now and wanted to meet up as soon as possible to sort it out.
We caught up a few days later, and I asked her why the sudden phone call as I get these types of calls all the time. She explained that her best friend’s husband had colon cancer and had to have half his colon removed.
Now, it wasn’t just because someone close to her got cancer, because people get cancer all the time, it was more the fact that this family was super healthy, was never sick, never went to the GP, ate organic food and generally made my client feel a little bad about some of her own habits.
Anyway, the husband had a weird stomach cramp that wouldn’t go away, so he finally saw his GP, and the outcome was a tumor the size of a tennis ball in his appendix. We have a great public health system for acute conditions, which is something I tell my clients all the time, but the issue here is that although a golf ball-sized tumor in your appendix is serious, there are more serious issues out there, so the result was a three- to four-month wait to have surgery to remove this large tumor.
Think about that for a second: you have a golf ball-sized tumor in your kidney every day when you get up and go to work and when you go to sleep at night, but because it’s not more life threatening than other issues out there, you are told it will be taken care of in three to four months and to just hang in there and they will just monitor it.
My client went on to explain that the husband had private medical insurance and was able to be booked into an excellent private hospital outside of Auckland and a week later he had a top surgeon performing a 10-hour operation that cost $80,000, where they removed half the colon and blasted the area with radiation for 30 minutes to try to stop it spreading.
For my client to add the medical insurance to her existing policy increased it by $32.41 a fortnight. Put into perspective, it was now an insignificant price to pay. In fact, she didn’t even ask me how much it cost because she didn’t care, she ‘had to have it anyway’.
I come across real-life situations like this every week in my role, and really get to see the benefits of having the right amount of insurance in place. It’s always difficult when someone sits in front of me and says that eat good food and exercise, so nothing will happen to them.
Every story like this makes me want to do an even better job to advise my clients effectively on the reality of risk.