Lifetime Reserve Days

There are a couple perks to having to stay in the hospital. Daytime TV and Jell-O spring to mind. But one of the many non-perks of being hospitalized, other than the whole illness or injury factor, of course, is that it can be pricey. If we’ve got health insurance, our policy probably covers a certain number of days of hospitalization per coverage period—for example, Medicare covers 90 days of hospitalization per period—but what happens if we need to stay longer? What happens if we’re only covered for 90 days, but we really need to stay for 93?

Luckily for us, lifetime reserve days exist. “Lifetime reserve days” are days of hospitalization that are covered beyond the standard per-period coverage. For example, our insurance policy might offer 30 lifetime reserve days on top of the 90 per-period days. What this means is that, over the course of our lifetime (or at least, over the course of the lifetime of the policy), we have 30 extra covered hospital days. So if we use three this year, that means we only have 27 left. And that’s total, forever...not just until our current coverage period ends.

If we decide that our policy coverage simply does not provide enough lifetime reserve days, we can buy additional supplemental policies that will cover more. But those can get pricey too, and we may decide that, unless we’ve got a serious health emergency going on, it might be better to just try and avoid staying at the hospital any more than absolutely necessary.