Decision

UniMed is raising premiums without publishing a number, and its new $150 excesses are a second increase

Source: UniMed, Premium and Health Plan changes

New Zealand's third largest health insurer is raising prices for roughly 140,000 members from 1 August 2026 and has not said by how much. The same round adds $150 charges on common scopes and scans, a second increase that lands only on the members who claim.

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.

UniMed is putting up the price of its health cover from 1 August 2026. It has not said by how much. It is also adding a charge that members pay themselves every time they claim for some common tests (UniMed, retrieved 20 August 2026).

That new charge is $150 for each colonoscopy or gastroscopy, the camera tests used to look inside the gut, for anyone on the Hospital Select or Major Surgical plans. Hospital Select members also pay $150 for each CT, MRI or PET scan (UniMed, retrieved 20 August 2026).

UniMed is not small. It describes itself as "New Zealand's third largest health insurer, with 10% of the market and more than 140,000 members" (UniMed via Scoop, 5 June 2024, retrieved 20 August 2026). Rival insurer Partners Life did put a figure on its 2026 medical round: 16.6% (RiskinfoNZ, 17 March 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026). UniMed's page carries no percentage at all.

What did UniMed actually say?

UniMed's changes page lists the price and cover changes that start on 1 August 2026. It confirms that prices are going up, but never says how far: "We're carefully balancing price increases with benefit changes to manage costs responsibly" (UniMed, retrieved 20 August 2026). The reasons it gives are more people turning to private healthcare as the public system strains, medical and general inflation, and "higher claims costs at a level we haven't seen before" (same source).

Here are the cover changes, all from that same page, retrieved 20 August 2026.

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, do not carry the charge.
A $150 charge per scan, covering CT, MRI and PET, for everyone on the Hospital Select plan. Scans claimed under the plan's Surgery Prior/Post Admission Benefit, the cover for scans tied to an operation, 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 has not held cover without a break for three years by 1 August 2026.
Breast reconstruction after a mastectomy must now start within two years. UniMed has also reworded its definitions of radiotherapy and weight loss surgery (same source).

The page also explains how often prices move. Members who buy cover as individuals get two reviews a year. One is "focused on premium and benefits (effective 1 August)". The other is "related to a Member's age (in line with your policy anniversary)". UniMed says it will contact members "to confirm your new premium 45 days before your first billing date on or after 1 August 2026" (UniMed, retrieved 20 August 2026).

Why is this really two price rises?

An excess does the same job as a premium rise, but only sick members pay it

Start with the insurer's side. Every $150 excess a member hands over is $150 UniMed no longer pays out. An excess that cuts what UniMed pays and a premium rise that brings the same money in do the same work.

The difference is what you can see. A premium rise can show up as a published percentage. An excess never shows up in any premium figure, because members pay it at the hospital desk, not on their invoice.

Now the member's side, using only figures UniMed publishes. Someone on Hospital Select who has one diagnostic colonoscopy and one MRI in a year now pays $150 plus $150, so $300, for treatment the plan covered in full before 1 August 2026 (retrieved 20 August 2026). Their real price increase for the year is the unpublished premium rise plus that $300, which is just two published charges added together.

Who carries the cost is the sharper point. A premium rise spreads it 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 this, since routine monitoring scopes and surgery-linked scans carry no charge. The design still moves cost off the healthy and onto the newly diagnosed.

Two reviews a year stack into one bigger number

UniMed's 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 their policy anniversary (UniMed, retrieved 20 August 2026). Neither figure is published.

Two rises multiply rather than simply add. This is plain arithmetic, not UniMed's numbers. A 5% rate rise followed by a 5% age rise is 1.05 times 1.05, which is 10.25% across the year, not 10%. Whatever the real pair is, the yearly change is the two multiplied together, and the August letter shows only one.

The 45-day notice tells each member their own new price. It does not tell them, or their adviser, what the average rise was across all members. That average stays private.

How does UniMed compare with the rest of the market?

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, retrieved 20 August 2026)	22 April 2026
Partners Life, Journey Plan private medical	2.0% (RiskinfoNZ, 17 March 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026)	22 April 2026
Aon forecast for how fast New Zealand medical costs will rise	18% (Insurance Business NZ, 5 December 2025, retrieved 20 August 2026)	2026 year
UniMed, all individual plans	No percentage published (UniMed, retrieved 20 August 2026)	1 August 2026

Aon is a global insurance broker that forecasts medical costs each year. It puts New Zealand's rise for 2026 at 18%, up from 17% in 2025 and nearly double the 9.8% it forecasts worldwide (Insurance Business NZ, 5 December 2025, retrieved 20 August 2026).

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 prove it wrong by publishing the average.

The silence matters more here because the cover changed at the same time. The real change in what a member pays is the price rise, plus the new charges, plus the narrowed cover. Even a member who reads the 45-day letter closely sees only the first of the three.

What happens to my policy?

Your renewal letter is not the whole change. If you are on Hospital Select, the percentage in that letter understates what you will actually pay, because every scope and every scan now carries its own $150 (retrieved 20 August 2026). Check which plan you are on before you judge the increase.

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 treatment is on your horizon, the timing matters.

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 you far more than the excess. 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 we could not check

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.

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 is above or below Partners Life's 16.6% or Aon's 18% forecast, only that nobody can rank it.

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 found no newer published count. We also could not locate published 2026 average increases for Southern Cross or nib, so the comparison table is only as complete as public disclosure allows, which is the story in miniature.

Sources

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