Your Day-to-Day Costs Now Count — And a New Way to See Your Real Total

Ask most people what makes one health insurance plan better than another, and they'll talk about premium and hospital cover — private room or semi-private, which hospitals are included, what the excess is. Sounds reasonable but it's incomplete.

For a lot of households, the bigger drag on the year isn't the hospital stay that might never happen — it's the GP visits, the physio sessions, the consultant appointments that definitely will. Those add up quietly, and until now our scoring treated them almost as an afterthought: a plan either had "day-to-day cover" or it didn't, full stop.

What changed in the score

We rebuilt day-to-day scoring from the ground up. Instead of a yes/no flag, the score now works out an expected annual reclaim for each plan — GP, Nurse, Consultant, Physio and Radiology visits, plus Minor Injury Clinic — using the actual reimbursement percentage, the euro cap per visit, and the annual visit limit each plan quotes. Whichever of those actually bites (a capped € amount, a percentage, or a visit ceiling) is what gets counted, netted against the plan's own outpatient excess and capped at its outpatient maximum.

In practice: two plans that look identical on hospital cover can now score very differently once you factor in that one caps GP reimbursement at €20 a visit and the other doesn't cap it at all. That difference used to be invisible. Now it's part of the number.

A new way to see the real total

The score change is about ranking. But some people don't want a score — they want a euro figure. So we built Total Healthcare Costs: tell it what a bad year realistically looks like for you — GP visits, hospital nights, procedures — and it works out the actual total annual cost, premium plus whatever each plan doesn't cover, across every plan on the market, cheapest first.

It's deliberately built around a worst realistic case, not last year's quiet year — insurance is for the year that goes wrong. Every result comes with a full shortfall breakdown, split into what's covered and what isn't, so you can see exactly where the number came from, not just what it is.

It also puts a real number on trade-offs that used to be guesswork. Plenty of plans trade a lower premium for a nightly excess on hospital admissions, or a shortfall on procedures like orthopaedic or ophthalmic surgery — and whether that trade-off pays off depends entirely on how much you actually end up claiming. Run the same scenario against a low-excess plan and a cheaper, higher-shortfall one, and you can see exactly where the break-even sits: the number of hospital nights, or the specific procedures, at which the "cheaper" plan stops being cheaper overall.

It's live now in the main menu, marked beta while we keep sharpening it.

Try it

If you've never really trusted that your day-to-day usage was being weighed properly, this is the fix. Head to Total Healthcare Costs, enter a realistic year, and see what your actual cost looks like across the market.