Decision

UniMed now charges $150 a scope or scan, and will not say how far premiums rose

Source: UniMed, Premium and Health Plan changes

From 1 August 2026 roughly 140,000 members pay the first $150 of each colonoscopy or gastroscopy themselves, and on one plan the first $150 of every CT, MRI and PET scan. Those tests were covered in full in July. The premium rise that arrived with them has no published number.

By Henry Smith · Premiums · 2026-08-01

What this means for you Roughly 140,000 UniMed members get a price rise from 1 August 2026 that the insurer has not put a number on. Members on Hospital Select and Major Surgical plans now pay a fixed charge of their own each time they claim for a scope or a scan, on top of whatever the renewal letter says. Anyone with less than three years of cover also has to wait longer for two treatments.

Written by Henry Smith · Reviewed by Smiths Insurance & KiwiSaver, licensed Financial Advice Provider (FSP712931)

If your doctor sends you for a colonoscopy after 1 August 2026 and you are with UniMed, you now pay the first $150 of it yourself. The same goes for a gastroscopy, the camera test used to look inside the gut. If you are on the Hospital Select plan, $150 also comes off every CT, MRI and PET scan you claim. In July, those tests were covered in full (UniMed).

So a Hospital Select member who has one diagnostic scope and one scan in the year ahead pays $300 of their own money, from two published charges that did not exist a month ago.

That is the second increase in this round. The first is the premium itself, which goes up on 1 August for every individual member of an insurer that calls itself "New Zealand's third largest health insurer, with 10% of the market and more than 140,000 members" (UniMed via Scoop, 5 June 2024). UniMed has not said how far prices are rising. There is no percentage anywhere on its changes page.

What that means for you turns on one thing: whether you claim. Members who get through the year without a scope or a scan pay whatever the renewal letter says. Members who claim pay that plus the new charges, and the letter never mentions them. The cost moves off the healthy and onto the newly diagnosed, which is the group with the least room to move, because a new policy somewhere else will not cover a condition you are already being investigated for.

What changed on 1 August

Prices are going up and cover is being trimmed in the same round. UniMed gives its reasons as more people turning to private healthcare while the public system strains, medical and general inflation, and "higher claims costs at a level we haven't seen before". On price it says only that it is "carefully balancing price increases with benefit changes to manage costs responsibly". Here is the full list of cover changes, all from the same changes page.

An excess of $150 per colonoscopy or gastroscopy for everyone on the Hospital Select and Major Surgical plans. An excess is a fixed amount you pay yourself before the insurer pays the rest. Routine monitoring scopes, where the member has no symptoms, carry no charge.
$150 per scan, covering CT, MRI and PET, for everyone on Hospital Select. Scans tied to an operation, claimed under the plan's Surgery Prior/Post Admission Benefit, are exempt.
A new three-year wait before a member can claim for removing teeth that are impacted or have never come through, or for varicose vein treatment. It applies to anyone who does not have three unbroken years of cover at 1 August 2026.
Breast reconstruction after a mastectomy must now start within two years. The definitions of radiotherapy and weight loss surgery have been reworded.

Members will hear their own new price, and only their own, 45 days before their first billing date on or after 1 August 2026 (UniMed, same page).

Why an excess is a price rise you cannot see

Take the excesses on UniMed's list from the insurer's side. Every $150 a member hands over at the hospital desk is $150 UniMed does not pay out. An excess that cuts what the insurer pays and a premium rise that brings the same money in do the same work. The difference is what anyone can see. A premium rise can be published as a percentage. An excess never shows up in a premium figure at all, because it is paid at the desk rather than on the invoice.

Who carries it is the sharper point. A premium rise spreads the cost across everyone on the books. An excess puts the same cost recovery on the people who claim, and scopes and scans are exactly the claims that arrive at the start of someone's worst health year. The exemptions soften that, since routine monitoring scopes and surgery-linked scans are free of the charge. The direction does not change.

There is one more thing the renewal letter will not show. The same page says members who buy cover as individuals face two pricing events a year: the 1 August review of price and cover, and an age-based rise on the policy anniversary. Two rises multiply rather than add. As plain arithmetic, not UniMed's numbers, a 5% rate rise followed by a 5% age rise comes to 10.25% across the year, not 10%. The August letter shows one of the two.

The number nobody published

Here is the 2026 New Zealand health premium round, from published figures.

Insurer or benchmark	Published figure	Starts
Partners Life, Partners Protection Plan private medical	16.6% (RiskinfoNZ, 17 March 2026)	22 April 2026
Partners Life, Journey Plan private medical	2.0% (the same RiskinfoNZ report)	22 April 2026
Aon forecast for how fast New Zealand medical costs will rise	18% (Insurance Business NZ, 5 December 2025)	2026 year
UniMed, all individual plans	No percentage published (the same UniMed page)	1 August 2026

Aon is a global insurance broker that forecasts medical costs each year. Its 18% for New Zealand is up from 17% in 2025 and nearly double the 9.8% it forecasts worldwide (the same Insurance Business NZ report).

In a market rising that fast, an insurer whose own increase came in well under Partners Life's 16.6% would have every reason to say so. A good number is free advertising. Silence does not prove the increase is large. It does remove the one figure that would let members and advisers see where their insurer sits. That is our inference, and UniMed can settle it by publishing the average.

What does this mean for my policy?

Your renewal letter is not the whole change. If you are on Hospital Select, the number in that letter understates what you will pay in a year you need tests, because each scope and each scan now carries its own $150 (UniMed's changes page). Which plan you are on decides whether that applies to you at all.

If you joined UniMed or Accuro after 1 August 2023, you will not have three unbroken years of cover by 1 August 2026, so the new three-year wait applies to you for impacted teeth removal and varicose vein treatment (same source, working the dates back from the page's three-year condition). If either is on your horizon, the timing matters more than the price.

Switching insurers to dodge an excess is rarely as clean as it looks. A new policy starts fresh waiting periods, and it will not cover anything you have already been treated for or already have symptoms of. That can cost far more than the charge you were trying to avoid. Compare the whole design, not the headline, with our health insurance guide and compare insurers tool, and weigh the excess against real procedure prices in our treatment costs data.

What can we not tell you?

We could not find UniMed's average premium increase anywhere. That is the point of this piece and also its limit: we cannot say whether UniMed's rise sits above or below the 16.6% and the 18% forecast in the table above, only that nobody outside UniMed can rank it.

UniMed's changes page carries no publication date. We date this piece by the 1 August 2026 start date the page states, and we retrieved it on 20 August 2026. The page does not say what wait, if any, applied to impacted teeth or varicose vein treatment before this change, so we cannot say how much cover recent joiners lost. It also does not say whether the $150 charges stop after a certain number in a year, and we could not confirm that either way.

The Partners Life figures reach us through RiskinfoNZ's report of a notice sent to advisers, not a Partners Life page. The Aon figures reach us through Insurance Business NZ, not Aon's own report. The 140,000 member count and third-largest ranking come from UniMed's June 2024 release and may have moved since. We also could not locate published 2026 average increases for Southern Cross or nib, so the table above is only as complete as public disclosure allows, which is the story in miniature.

What this means for your cover

What moves a renewal price, and what a review can and cannot change about it. Health insurance in New Zealand

Sources

Every source below was read and checked on 21 August 2026.

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