Posts Tagged ‘definition of health insurance’

What Is The Definition Of Health Insurance?

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

The idea behind health insurance is a pretty simple one and it’s something that you need to understand before you purchase a policy. Some people don’t fully grasp health insurance, so they never really understand what to look for when they’re out shopping for different policies. With that in mind, what is the definition of health insurance in the most understandable terms possible? Health insurance can be defined either quickly and simply, or it can have a much more drawn out, evolved definition.

The simple definition of health insurance

When you talk about health insurance in its simplest terms, you have to talk about contingencies. Health insurance is something that protects against possible health costs in the future. You will pay premiums each month, even if you don’t use the health insurance at all. What happens is that you’ll have protection in the case that you actually run into medical trouble. This might seem quite simplistic, but that’s what health insurance is all about. It’s about paying for a contingency plan in case something goes wrong, in which case you will have a policy that pays for your medical needs.

The more advanced health insurance definition

When you get into a more complicated definition of health insurance, you can see where it might get confusing. There are different plans and as you will see, not every health insurance plan can be used in every instance. Some of them will have a deductible, which means you will have to pay a certain amount to use the health insurance. In some cases, this could be a few thousand dollars, so the health insurance would be useless for cases where the health need is less than the deductible. This makes the process quite confusing, because it adds so many different elements to the offing.

What is Health Insurance?

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Health insurance is difficult to define precisely. Different segments of the population have different ways of defining the term “health insurance.” As a result, it can be difficult to give a clear definition of what exactly constitutes “health insurance.”

How might we solve this problem?

To make it easier on ourselves, let’s look at how two segments of the population define what “health insurance” is. Economists and the general public have very different ways of defining what “health insurance” is. These definitions are interesting to study because even though they may sound different, they form a reasonably accurate description of what is “health insurance” when they are put together. To see this, let us see how our groups would define “health insurance.”

Let us first look at an economist’s definition of what is “health insurance.”
Economists define insurance to be, “A contract between two or more parties that is used to protect against future risks and liabilities.” Therefore, most economists would probably define “health insurance” to be, “A contract between two or more parties that is used to protect against future health risks.” This definition vaguely explains what health insurance is because it doesn’t tell us who the “parties” are or what the “risks and liabilities” are. Let us make it more specific by using the general public’s definition of what is “health insurance.”

The general public’s definition of health insurance:
The general public usually defines “health insurance” in three ways. First, they consider it to be something that they must purchase from an insurance company. Second, they consider health insurance as being something that allows them to save money on their health care costs. Finally, they consider it to be something that protects people against the rising costs of health care.

Therefore, we can define “health insurance” to be…
“A contract between two parties (usually an insurance company and a consumer) that enables a consumer to save money on their health care costs while protecting themselves against future increases in health care costs. “

This definition is reasonably accurate and is good enough for most educated laymen.