1. Time period for which benefits are payable under an insurance contract without a new deductible requirement. These effective dates of coverage can be a designated 6-month period, calendar year, or a plan’s anniversary date. Also called spell of illness . 2. Period of time for which payments for Medicare inpatient hospital benefits are available. A benefit period begins the first day an enrollee is given inpatient hospital care (nursing care or rehabilitation services) by a qualified provider and ends when the enrollee has not been an inpatient for 60 consecutive days. Patient must pay the hospital insurance deductible for each benefit period. 3. In workers’ compensation cases, the maximum amount of time that benefits will be paid to the injured or ill person for the disability.
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Commonly disability insurance is has benefit periods of 2 or 5 years, to age 65, or, in some cases, life. Since the chances of becoming disabled are much more for a person 40 years old than the chances of dying and the average length of disability is 3.2 years, the selection of a proper benefit period is important.