Insurance for Doctors and Health Professionals in NZ: What You Actually Need and What You Don't

I need to be upfront about something before this post goes any further. I am not licensed to sell insurance, and I don’t. What I do is assess whether you actually need cover, what kind, and roughly why, independent of any insurer or product. If cover is genuinely warranted, I refer the implementation to broker partners who are licensed to arrange it. That separation is the whole point of this post: you can get an honest answer about what you need before anyone is trying to sell you anything.

I’m writing this with doctors and other health professionals in mind because that’s a group I work with often, and because high, sometimes irregular income and physically or mentally demanding work make some of these questions sharper. But everything below applies just as much to a business owner, a tradesperson, or anyone else whose income depends on their ability to keep working.

The categories worth thinking about

Income protection. If you couldn’t work for six months due to illness or injury, what actually happens to your household income. This is the one people most often underinsure, or don’t review as their income grows, so cover set up early in a career quietly stops matching current reality.

Trauma or critical illness cover. A lump sum paid on diagnosis of a serious condition, intended to cover the costs and life disruption that come with it rather than replace ongoing income specifically.

Life cover. Provision for dependants or debts if you die. Straightforward in concept, but the right amount depends entirely on your specific debts, dependants, and other assets, not a generic multiple of income.

Key person or practice-related cover. If you’re a partner in a practice or a business owner, there can be a case for cover that protects the business itself if a key person is suddenly unable to work, separate from your personal cover.

I’m deliberately not giving figures, formulas, or “you should have X times your income” rules here. Those numbers depend entirely on individual circumstances, existing assets, debt, dependants, other cover, and getting them wrong in either direction, too little or too much, is a real cost. That’s exactly why this needs an actual assessment rather than a rule of thumb from a blog post.

Common mistakes I see

Underinsuring income protection. Cover that was adequate as a graduate and was never updated as income rose. Nobody revisits it because nobody’s job is to.

Over-insuring for the wrong risk. Sometimes people end up with large amounts of one type of cover, say life insurance, while the more statistically likely risk, being unable to work for an extended period, is thinly covered or missing entirely.

Duplicate or misaligned cover. Policies picked up at different times, through different advisers or employers, that overlap in places and leave gaps in others. Nobody has ever looked at them side by side.

Cover bought because it was offered, not because it was needed. This is the most common one. A policy gets bought because someone made it easy to buy, not because a proper needs analysis said it was the right size or type.

Why the order matters

The reason I don’t hold an insurance licence is not an oversight, it’s structural. An adviser who earns commission on the policy they recommend has an obvious incentive to recommend a policy. Separating the needs assessment from the sale means the assessment isn’t shaped by what pays best. I look at what you actually need, put it in writing as part of your wider plan, and if cover is warranted, hand that off to a broker partner to arrange the specific policy. You stay in control of the decision at every step.

If you’re not sure whether your current cover, or lack of it, actually matches your situation, that’s a reasonable thing to bring to a free discovery session. We can look at where things stand and what, if anything, is worth acting on.