If you've lost cover for something you need, e.g. cover for pregnancy, but missed the 1 April deadline, call your insurer. Ask if you can upgrade to avoid re-serving waiting periods.

If you're having treatment now or have surgery booked, the changes may not affect you for at least 3 to 6 months. Call your insurer to confirm.

Policies are still changing to meet the new rules, so it's best to wait until mid-year to decide whether you want to switch or not.

Before comparing, check what level of cover is best for you under the new system: gold, silver or bronze.

You can compare what's available now on the government site privatehealth.gov.au - but not all changes to policies will be shown.

We're digging into the data now to bring you our recommendations as soon as we can. Sign up now for updates.

Choose a higher excess. New policies can offer higher excesses of up to $750 per person and up to $1500 per couple/family will be available. Choosing a higher excess will reduce your premium.

Get an U30s discount. For every year you're under 30, funds can offer a discount of 2% on your premium, up to a max of 10% for 18- to 25-year-olds. You can keep the full discount till you're 40.

The federal government's health insurance reforms aim to make insurance easier to understand. That's the theory, anyway.

Under the new rules, all hospital policies will change starting 1 April to fit into one of four tiers:

• Gold
• Silver
• Bronze
• Basic

But it's actually becoming less easy to compare, because insurers can also offer Basic Plus, Bronze Plus and Silver Plus policies that add on more treatments, with thousands of combinations possible.

Not everyone needs private health insurance in Australia. Medicare covers your care in public hospitals.

If you're seriously ill or have an accident you’ll usually end up in the nearest public hospital in emergency and receive high quality care for free.

But some people can benefit from private health insurance or save at tax time. Take the Do I need health insurance? quiz to see if you're one of them.

The changes to health insurance affect how our database works. That means there’s a chance our tool won’t recommend the best cover you can get right now.

We need time to analyse the data and make sure we're giving you great advice. So for now we've taken our tool down to do that work.