We built the thing. Here's why.

Every year, around renewal time, the same thing happens in households across Ireland. The letter arrives. The premium has gone up. You open the laptop with the best intentions, spend twenty minutes cross-referencing benefit tables, give up, and renew.

We did this for years. Then we stopped accepting it as normal.

The Irish private health insurance market has four insurers and over 300 active plans. The benefit tables run to twelve pages. Co-payments are buried in footnotes. "Semi-private in a hi-tech hospital" and "private in a contracted facility" are not the same thing, and the difference matters — but working out exactly how much it matters, for your specific situation, is a task that would test a health economist.

The complexity isn't accidental. New plans are launched annually, not always because they offer something genuinely new, but because a fresh name resets the comparison clock. Older plans quietly absorb price increases. Benefits get split, renamed, rebundled. The result, documented by the HIA itself, is that a significant proportion of policyholders are paying hundreds of euros more per year than they need to — not because the cheaper plan is worse, but because finding it was too much work.

That's the gap MedPlan was built to close.

What it actually does

MedPlan ingests benefit schedules from every active plan on the Irish market, normalises them onto a common scoring scale, and runs a Pareto analysis to identify the plans that aren't dominated — the ones where no other plan offers better cover for the same money or the same cover for less.

That gives you an efficient frontier. But the useful part is the personalisation layer on top of it. You tell the tool what matters to you — maternity cover, private hospital access, specialist procedures, day-to-day outpatient, excess sensitivity — and the model re-weights the frontier around your priorities in real time. The result isn't a generic best-plan list. It's a ranked comparison built around your situation.

Every score is decomposable. You can see exactly which benefit dimensions are driving the difference between your current plan and any alternative. No black box.

What it isn't

MedPlan isn't a broker. We're not affiliated with any insurer, we don't earn commission, and we don't have a preferred outcome. The tool doesn't model claims experience, network adequacy by region, or your individual medical history — those are real factors and we're transparent about that. The intent is to be a high-quality first filter: remove the dominated options, surface the plans worth reading closely, and give you a defensible basis for the decision.

The final call is yours. We'd just rather you made it with better information than a twelve-page PDF and forty-five minutes you don't have.

Run the comparison

It takes two minutes. No sign-up required to start. If you're on the right plan, the tool will confirm it. If you're not, it'll show you exactly where the gap is.