Insurance Claim Review
Review of claims by insurance companies to determine liability and amount of payment for various services. The review may also include determination of eligibility of the claimant or beneficiary or of the provider of the benefit; determination that the benefit is covered or not payable under another policy; or determination that the service was necessary and of reasonable cost and quality.
Insurance, Health
Insurance, Accident
Insurance Carriers
Insurance Coverage
Generally refers to the amount of protection available and the kind of loss which would be paid for under an insurance contract with an insurer. (Slee & Slee, Health Care Terms, 2d ed)
Health Systems Plans
Statements of goals for the delivery of health services pertaining to the Health Systems Agency service area, established under PL 93-641, and consistent with national guidelines for health planning.
Insurance
Taiwan
Health Expenditures
The amounts spent by individuals, groups, nations, or private or public organizations for total health care and/or its various components. These amounts may or may not be equivalent to the actual costs (HEALTH CARE COSTS) and may or may not be shared among the patient, insurers, and/or employers.
Insurance, Long-Term Care
Health insurance to provide full or partial coverage for long-term home care services or for long-term nursing care provided in a residential facility such as a nursing home.
Health Care Costs
The actual costs of providing services related to the delivery of health care, including the costs of procedures, therapies, and medications. It is differentiated from HEALTH EXPENDITURES, which refers to the amount of money paid for the services, and from fees, which refers to the amount charged, regardless of cost.
United States
The term "United States" in a medical context often refers to the country where a patient or study participant resides, and is not a medical term per se, but relevant for epidemiological studies, healthcare policies, and understanding differences in disease prevalence, treatment patterns, and health outcomes across various geographic locations.
Insurance, Life
National Health Programs
Components of a national health care system which administer specific services, e.g., national health insurance.
Databases, Factual
Extensive collections, reputedly complete, of facts and data garnered from material of a specialized subject area and made available for analysis and application. The collection can be automated by various contemporary methods for retrieval. The concept should be differentiated from DATABASES, BIBLIOGRAPHIC which is restricted to collections of bibliographic references.
Insurance Pools
Medically Uninsured
Individuals or groups with no or inadequate health insurance coverage. Those falling into this category usually comprise three primary groups: the medically indigent (MEDICAL INDIGENCY); those whose clinical condition makes them medically uninsurable; and the working uninsured.
Republic of Korea
The capital is Seoul. The country, established September 9, 1948, is located on the southern part of the Korean Peninsula. Its northern border is shared with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Medicare
Federal program, created by Public Law 89-97, Title XVIII-Health Insurance for the Aged, a 1965 amendment to the Social Security Act, that provides health insurance benefits to persons over the age of 65 and others eligible for Social Security benefits. It consists of two separate but coordinated programs: hospital insurance (MEDICARE PART A) and supplementary medical insurance (MEDICARE PART B). (Hospital Administration Terminology, AHA, 2d ed and A Discursive Dictionary of Health Care, US House of Representatives, 1976)
Insurance Selection Bias
Insurance, Liability
Insurance Benefits
Payments or services provided under stated circumstances under the terms of an insurance policy. In prepayment programs, benefits are the services the programs will provide at defined locations and to the extent needed.
Drug Costs
Retrospective Studies
Studies used to test etiologic hypotheses in which inferences about an exposure to putative causal factors are derived from data relating to characteristics of persons under study or to events or experiences in their past. The essential feature is that some of the persons under study have the disease or outcome of interest and their characteristics are compared with those of unaffected persons.
Insurance, Health, Reimbursement
Payment by a third-party payer in a sum equal to the amount expended by a health care provider or facility for health services rendered to an insured or program beneficiary. (From Facts on File Dictionary of Health Care Management, 1988)
Ambulatory Care
Health Benefit Plans, Employee
Health insurance plans for employees, and generally including their dependents, usually on a cost-sharing basis with the employer paying a percentage of the premium.
Medicaid
Federal program, created by Public Law 89-97, Title XIX, a 1965 amendment to the Social Security Act, administered by the states, that provides health care benefits to indigent and medically indigent persons.
Insurance, Major Medical
Cohort Studies
Studies in which subsets of a defined population are identified. These groups may or may not be exposed to factors hypothesized to influence the probability of the occurrence of a particular disease or other outcome. Cohorts are defined populations which, as a whole, are followed in an attempt to determine distinguishing subgroup characteristics.
Universal Coverage
Health insurance coverage for all persons in a state or country, rather than for some subset of the population. It may extend to the unemployed as well as to the employed; to aliens as well as to citizens; for pre-existing conditions as well as for current illnesses; for mental as well as for physical conditions.
National Health Insurance, United States
National Health Insurance in the United States refers to a proposed system of healthcare financing that would provide comprehensive coverage for all residents, funded through a combination of government funding and mandatory contributions, and administered by a public agency.
Logistic Models
Statistical models which describe the relationship between a qualitative dependent variable (that is, one which can take only certain discrete values, such as the presence or absence of a disease) and an independent variable. A common application is in epidemiology for estimating an individual's risk (probability of a disease) as a function of a given risk factor.
Malpractice
Health Care Reform
Innovation and improvement of the health care system by reappraisal, amendment of services, and removal of faults and abuses in providing and distributing health services to patients. It includes a re-alignment of health services and health insurance to maximum demographic elements (the unemployed, indigent, uninsured, elderly, inner cities, rural areas) with reference to coverage, hospitalization, pricing and cost containment, insurers' and employers' costs, pre-existing medical conditions, prescribed drugs, equipment, and services.
Insurance, Hospitalization
Health insurance providing benefits to cover or partly cover hospital expenses.
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
Public Law 104-91 enacted in 1996, was designed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the healthcare system, protect health insurance coverage for workers and their families, and to protect individual personal health information.
Incidence
Age Factors
Age as a constituent element or influence contributing to the production of a result. It may be applicable to the cause or the effect of a circumstance. It is used with human or animal concepts but should be differentiated from AGING, a physiological process, and TIME FACTORS which refers only to the passage of time.
State Health Plans
Health Services Accessibility
Eligibility Determination
Risk Factors
Private Sector
Insurance, Pharmaceutical Services
Financing, Personal
Payment by individuals or their family for health care services which are not covered by a third-party payer, either insurance or medical assistance.
Insurance, Physician Services
Insurance, Disability
Insurance designed to compensate persons who lose wages because of illness or injury; insurance providing periodic payments that partially replace lost wages, salary, or other income when the insured is unable to work because of illness, injury, or disease. Individual and group disability insurance are two types of such coverage. (From Facts on File Dictionary of Health Care Management, 1988, p207)
Cost Sharing
Provisions of an insurance policy that require the insured to pay some portion of covered expenses. Several forms of sharing are in use, e.g., deductibles, coinsurance, and copayments. Cost sharing does not refer to or include amounts paid in premiums for the coverage. (From Dictionary of Health Services Management, 2d ed)
Social Security
Government sponsored social insurance programs.
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
An Act prohibiting a health plan from establishing lifetime limits or annual limits on the dollar value of benefits for any participant or beneficiary after January 1, 2014. It permits a restricted annual limit for plan years beginning prior to January 1, 2014. It provides that a health plan shall not be prevented from placing annual or lifetime per-beneficiary limits on covered benefits. The Act sets up a competitive health insurance market.
Liability, Legal
Managed Care Programs
Health insurance plans intended to reduce unnecessary health care costs through a variety of mechanisms, including: economic incentives for physicians and patients to select less costly forms of care; programs for reviewing the medical necessity of specific services; increased beneficiary cost sharing; controls on inpatient admissions and lengths of stay; the establishment of cost-sharing incentives for outpatient surgery; selective contracting with health care providers; and the intensive management of high-cost health care cases. The programs may be provided in a variety of settings, such as HEALTH MAINTENANCE ORGANIZATIONS and PREFERRED PROVIDER ORGANIZATIONS.
Health Insurance Exchanges
State-provided health insurance marketplaces established under the PATIENT PROTECTION AND AFFORDABLE CARE ACT.
Workers' Compensation
Health Care Surveys
Statistical measures of utilization and other aspects of the provision of health care services including hospitalization and ambulatory care.
Socioeconomic Factors
Poverty
A situation in which the level of living of an individual, family, or group is below the standard of the community. It is often related to a specific income level.
State Government
Cost Control
The containment, regulation, or restraint of costs. Costs are said to be contained when the value of resources committed to an activity is not considered excessive. This determination is frequently subjective and dependent upon the specific geographic area of the activity being measured. (From Dictionary of Health Services Management, 2d ed)