Your new premium will apply to your next payment from 1 April 2020 and will be communicated to you as well as available for you to view online via My Medibank, from early February. Don't forget that you can choose how often you pay your premium - fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, every six months, or every year. To change your premium payment frequency please log in to My Medibank.

We're tackling increasing healthcare costs in a number of ways:

• Working closely with the government on policy reform to reduce costs in heath cover.
• Investing in primary care programs for eligible people with chronic conditions to help them stay out of hospital.
• Partnering with the healthcare sector to support better health outcomes for members.
• Launching the Live Better rewards programme to help Australians get healthy and stay healthy.

We know how important affordable health cover is to you and have been working to provide better support and value for members. We’ve also worked hard to take costs out of our business – $40 million in the past two years and a further $50 million planned over the next three years.

We’ve worked hard to reduce costs as a deliberate strategy to provide our product at the best possible price for our customers.  This year we’ve delivered:

• The Government’s industry-wide reforms, focused on making health insurance more accessible and simple to understand.
• Our members wanted more control over where and when to get treatment, so we developed Medibank at Home, a group of trial programs that bring hospital care right into the homes of our eligible members, where available, providing them with choice and flexibility over where they receive their treatment.

No, the main reason premiums are increasing is the rising cost of healthcare and an increase in the frequency of Australians seeking treatment. Medibank’s premiums need to keep pace with these costs to maintain the quality of cover and continue to meet our members' healthcare needs.

No, we’ve paid dividends for many years. The difference is that instead having of one shareholder, the Australian Government, we now have many shareholders.

The Government reforms introduced in April this year have been designed to make the private health system simpler, easier to understand and more affordable for all Australians.

Medibank made the decision to adopt all the Government’s optional reforms because it was the right thing to do.

This includes giving customers the option to increase their excess to $750 to reduce their premium. It also means introducing a discount of up to 10% for young adults.

The cost of delivering healthcare costs in Australia continues to rise, largely driven by more frequent and more expensive hospital admissions and a population that is getting older.