Dear LisaB
In order to handle my Mum's application, I have really only paid attention to the elements that are absolutely crucial to her, so I'm not sure of the answers to all of your questions, but I'll try and others might help.
Sponsorship: I believe you would have to have Permanent Residence status for a minimum of two years before you could sponsor your parents. If there are any exceptions to this general rule, I don't know what they are, and I would guess it would be unlikely that any exceptions that there might be could be used in your case.
Health Insurance: Irrelevent for Contributory Parent visas. If you don't have it, it would not stop you from getting a CP visa. If you do have it, it will be ignored for the purposes of determining whether or not the applicant meets the health criteria. So it would not affect your parents chances one way or the other, but obviously, if you and they believe it would be desirable to have private health cover, that is a separate issue.
Medicals: From what I have read on BE, Panel Doctors seem to vary in how thorough they are. They are GPs. The form they have to fill in (Form 26, which you can download from the Australian High Commission website in London) is not particularly searching. The Medical Officer of the Commonwealth can, will and regularly does ask for further tests-examinations conducted by specialist doctors.
If you look on www.immi.org and click on Forms & Booklets, find Form 1071i, which contains a good description of the health criteria and how they are applied. I suggest as well doing an advanced search of this forum, using keywords like Diabetes, medical, cancer and so forth, to see whether you can glean anything from those.
Finally, have you studied Booklet 3 to make sure that your Parents would be able to satisfy the balance of Family test and meet all the other criteria, plus have you studied the costs of CP visas?
Hope this helps
Gill
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