Term life insurance or term assurance is life insurance

Term life insurance or term assurance is life insurance which provides coverage at a fixed rate of payments for a limited period of time, the relevant term. After that period expires, coverage at the previous rate of premiums is no longer guaranteed and the client must either forgo coverage or potentially obtain further coverage with different payments or conditions. If the insured dies during the term, the death benefit will be paid to the beneficiary. Term insurance is the least expensive way to purchase a substantial death benefit on a coverage amount per premium dollar basis over a specific period of time.
Term life insurance is the original form of life insurance^{[citation needed]} and can be contrasted to permanent life insurance such as whole life, universal life, and variable universal life, which guarantee coverage at fixed premiums for the lifetime of the covered individual^{[dubious – discuss]}. Term insurance is not generally used for estate planning needs or charitable giving strategies but is used for pure income replacement needs for an individual. Term insurance functions in a manner similar to most other types of insurance in that it satisfies claims against what is insured if the premiums are up to date and the contract has not expired, and does not provide for a return of premium dollars if no claims are filed. As an example, auto insurance will satisfy claims against the insured in the event of an accident and a home owner policy will satisfy claims against the home if it is damaged or destroyed by, for example, a fire. Whether or not these events will occur is uncertain. If the policy holder discontinues coverage because he has sold the insured car or home, the insurance company will not refund the premium. This is purely risk protection

Read more ...

Tea Party’s gains in the state’s 2010 elections

They have done it with little more than a handshake agreement. Democrats will not die on the sword of bringing Planned Parenthood back into the fold, and Republicans will not put up additional barriers to women’s access to care.

“The major difference is we’re not fighting about it. We’re just doing what’s right for women and the state,” State Representative Sarah Davis, Republican of West University Place, said last month at a Texas Tribune symposium on health care.

There has not been a drawn-out public debate on abortion or women’s health in either chamber this legislative session. None of the 24 abortion-related bills filed have reached the House or Senate floor. And Ms. Davis, the only Republican member of the House Women’s Health Caucus, brokered a bipartisan grand bargain, as lawmakers refer to it, to prevent amendments to the House budget bill that could have jeopardized an agreement to restore women’s health dollars.

For some Republicans, this bargain hinged on the ballot box: Ms. Davis said several of her colleagues had faced blistering attacks after last session’s family-planning cuts — an effort, in part, to drive Planned Parenthood out of business — closed clinics in their districts that were not affiliated with abortion providers.

Ms. Davis, a breast cancer survivor who opposes abortion but will not support legislation she believes interferes with the doctor-patient relationship, said the best way she had found to help low-income women was “to remove emotion” from the debate. The arguments about abortion and Planned Parenthood in 2011 “did not advance the ball,” she said. “In fact, it just threw family planning into a tailspin.”

Bolstered by the Tea Party’s gains in the state’s 2010 elections, last session’s ultraconservative Legislature approved a law requiring women seeking an abortion to have a sonogram and hear a description of the fetus at least 24 hours before the procedure. In a targeted effort to exclude Planned Parenthood and other clinics affiliated with abortion providers from taxpayer-financed programs, lawmakers also cut the state’s family-planning budget by two-thirds.

As a direct result, 117 Texas family-planning clinics stopped receiving state financing and 56 of those clinics closed, according to researchers at the University of Texas at Austin who are conducting a three-year study to evaluate the Legislature’s policy changes.

The researchers estimate that 144,000 fewer women received health services and 30,000 fewer unintended pregnancies were averted in 2012 than in 2010. The state’s savings from the programs dropped by an estimated $163 million.

“A lot of people really felt they got snookered by some of the people in the pro-life movement about that family-planning issue,” said State Senator Bob Deuell, Republican of Greenville, who has been a strong advocate for restoring family-planning financing for low-income women by way of primary care.

Read more ...

health insurance system.

Data being released for the first time by the government on Wednesday shows that hospitals charge Medicare wildly differing amounts — sometimes 10 to 20 times what Medicare typically reimburses — for the same procedure, raising questions about how hospitals determine prices and why they differ so widely.

The data for 3,300 hospitals, released by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, shows wide variations not only regionally but among hospitals in the same area or city.

Government officials said that some of the variation might reflect the fact that some patients were sicker or required longer hospitalization.

Nonetheless, the data is likely to intensify a long debate over the methods that hospitals use to determine their charges.

Medicare does not actually pay the amount a hospital charges but instead uses a system of standardized payments to reimburse hospitals for treating specific conditions. Private insurers do not pay the full charge either, but negotiate payments with hospitals for specific treatments. Since many patients are covered by Medicare or have private insurance, they are not directly affected by what hospitals charge.

Experts say it is likely that the people who can afford it least — those with little or no insurance — are getting hit with extremely high hospitals bills that may bear little connection to the cost of treatment.

“If you’re uninsured, they’re going to ask you to pay,” said Gerard Anderson, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Hospital Finance and Management.

The debate over medical costs is growing louder, spurred partly by President Obama’s overhaul of the health insurance system.

Hospitals, in particular, have come under scrutiny for charges that are widely viewed as difficult to comprehend, even for experts. “Our goal is to make this information more transparent,” Jonathan Blum, the director of the agency’s Center for Medicare, said in an interview.

Read more ...

Health plans develop person-centered plans of care

Health plans develop person-centered plans of care based on patient-specific assessments. Plans have matched care to individual needs, reducing excessive use, improving quality and saving taxpayer dollars.

The article also suggests that plans target enrollment of healthier individuals. However, payments are proportional to each member’s level of care need.

Plans receive higher payments for sicker enrollees and lower payments for healthier enrollees. This payment method is explicitly intended to reduce incentives for selective enrollment. Since January 2012, 46,000 people have joined managed long-term care plans. While no system is perfect, most people have moved smoothly to managed care.

If enrollees disagree with their proposed plan of care, an independent appeals process protects members. Managed long-term care plans have improved care management and quality while reducing costs.

PAUL F. MACIELAK
President and Chief Executive
New York Health Plan Association
Albany, May 2, 2013

To the Editor:

This article and other recent articles offer the public a much-needed understanding of the problems that arise when a new government program is rolled out in haste.

Advocates have repeatedly argued that the implementation of New York’s new Medicaid managed long-term care program is being rushed and have called for a delay. The shameful stories of greed and deception as described in your articles point to the imperative for the state to halt implementation.

State officials must work with advocates and providers to ensure that thoughtful and transparent operations are in place before the plan is foisted upon the vulnerable elderly and the disabled who rely upon it for their health care.

Read more ...

Health insurance’s benefit is not “mostly or exclusively

Health insurance’s benefit is not “mostly or exclusively financial.” Nor, for most people, is the first purpose of insurance economic protection.

Rather, health insurance, Medicare and Medicaid’s primary benefit is to spread the cost and therefore share the benefits of health care for people who either cannot afford it or will not buy it until it is too late. It helps keep our social network functional.

Health insurance enables us to obtain, without any economic disincentives, basic health care, including vaccinations, childbirth, children’s checkups and other routine health care. With insurance, we can all afford and therefore benefit from basic health benefits.

Medicaid is not “deeply dysfunctional.” It, like Medicare, actually provides less expensive health care and to a less healthy part of our population than private health insurance.

BARBARA W. GOLD
STEPHEN F. GOLD
Philadelphia, May 6, 2013

The writers are a pediatrician and a disability rights lawyer, respectively.

To the Editor:

Ross Douthat presents an intriguing idea to replace Obamacare’s guarantee of full coverage with a plan limited to catastrophic expenses. But he has his politics reversed.

Liberals have offered numerous proposals for similar coverage flexibility, only to be met with cries of “death panels” and “rationing.” When Mr. Douthat assumes that conservatives are natural allies for his idea, he is looking for support in the wrong place.

Read more ...

Their insurance premiums will increase sharply

By now, most know how much insurance money they have to work with, though plenty of people are still struggling to get more. But a new federal law that happened to coincide with the arrival of the storm will cause flood insurance premiums to skyrocket and require stricter, and thus more expensive, rebuilding standards.

So in the most devastated communities, families are being forced to make difficult financial calculations: can they afford the new flood insurance premiums, which, at worst, can reach as high as $30,000 a year? Do they have the money to rebuild their homes to the government’s new specifications? Does it even pay to stay?

Some families have already thrown up their hands and put their houses up for sale, while others talk of making the best of really bad options. “This issue is more devastating to more people than Sandy itself, believe it or not,” said Ron Jampel, a resident of the Shore Acres section of Brick, N.J., who started an advocacy group for affected homeowners in New Jersey called Save Our Communities 2013.

Maria Zanetich, who lives across the street from the water in Point Pleasant, N.J., with her husband and two grown daughters, considers her family lucky in many respects: their first floor is still gutted, but they can continue to live on the top floor of their three-bedroom raised ranch. Their insurance premiums will increase sharply, however, unless they elevate their home five feet, which she said could cost more than $100,000 because their home sits on a concrete slab instead of a foundation with a crawl space.

“I paid my flood insurance on time every year, but I didn’t even know that I had a subsidy, much less one that is now being phased out,” said Ms. Zanetich, who provides early intervention services for children with developmental delays. “The insurance moneys that we received will not cover both elevating my house and repairs.”

She and her husband are applying for grant money — they have already received their flood insurance claim payment — and once they hear about that, they can determine their best course of action. “The more that I try to figure it out,” Ms. Zanetich said, “the more I realize that I don’t know what I don’t know.”

Read more ...

Health insurance coverage

Evoking the spirit of Mother’s Day, Mr. Obama said the law would be particularly beneficial to women, including many in the audience, who whooped and cheered as the president spoke at an event in the East Room of the White House.

In his remarks, Mr. Obama was more animated and more specific than he usually is in discussing the law, which was passed without any Republican votes.

“No one can be turned away from private insurance plans,” he said. “If you’re sick, you’ll finally have the same chance to buy quality, affordable health care as everybody else.”

The president made the moral case for universal health insurance coverage, an argument that he has often neglected in the past.

“The United States of America does not sentence its people to suffering just because they don’t make enough to buy insurance on the private market, just because their work doesn’t provide health insurance, just because they fall sick or suffer an accident,” Mr. Obama said. “That could happen to anybody. And regular access to a doctor or medicine or preventive care — that’s not some earned privilege; it is a right.”

He wound up his speech with a promise: “We’re going to keep fighting with everything we’ve got to secure that right, to make sure that every American gets the care that they need when they need it at a price that they can afford.”

The president’s pitch came as the Obama administration confirmed that Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, had tried to raise money from the private sector to pay for a huge “outreach and education” campaign publicizing potential benefits of the law. Congress has refused to provide as much money as Mr. Obama requested for the purpose.

Jason Young, a spokesman for Ms. Sebelius, said she had made fund-raising calls to advocates for patients, health care providers, churches and other outside groups. In addition, he said, she has called insurance company executives and endorsed the work of Enroll America, a private nonprofit group trying to secure coverage for the uninsured.

Insurers are extensively regulated by the federal government, but Mr. Young said Ms. Sebelius had not violated federal rules because she did not explicitly ask insurance executives to donate money. In addition, he said, her activities were authorized by the Public Health Service Act.

Still, Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, said he would investigate the efforts of Ms. Sebelius to determine if they violated any law or put undue pressure on health care executives.

The United States Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal investigative agency, said last year that Ms. Sebelius had engaged in “prohibited political activity” when she made “extemporaneous political remarks” during an official trip to North Carolina in February 2012.

Mr. Obama’s remarks on Friday followed weeks of criticism by Democrats in Congress, who had said that he needed to do a better job of defending and explaining the law.

He said Republicans were “telling tall tales” about the law.

“Some small businesses are being told their costs are going to go up, even though they’re exempted from the law or they actually stand to benefit from it,” Mr. Obama said. “Whenever insurance premiums go up, you’re being told it’s because of Obamacare, even though there’s no evidence that that’s the case.”

To Americans bewildered by the law, he said, “Don’t be bamboozled.”

Starting in October, individuals, families and small-business owners in every state will be able to shop for private insurance in online markets known as insurance exchanges. Coverage begins in January 2014, when most Americans will be required to have insurance. Administration officials said they expected seven million people to gain coverage through the exchanges in 2014, with the number growing to 29 million by the fifth year.

The officials said they were focusing, in particular, on 2.7 million healthy uninsured people age 18 to 35, whose premiums could help pay for the care of less healthy subscribers. More than 95 percent of people in this uninsured cohort do not have chronic conditions, the officials said, and one-third of them live in just three states: California, Florida and Texas.

Read more ...