Aged BetzeFciaries of Old-Age and Survivors hwrance: lights on Health hsurance and Hospitalixation

D ATA on health insurance ownership and use of hospitals were collected in the national survey of a sample of beneficiaries conducted by the Bureau of Old-Age and Survivors Insurance in the fall of 1957. The following highlights on ownership of hospitalization insurance or hospital-surgical insurance and on use of general hospitals by the aged persons in the surveyed families are from the preliminary tabulations. An earlier article presented background information about the survey and provided data on the income of beneficiary groups.1 As explained in that article, the survey itself omitted certain numerically small beneficiary types. In addition, the income tabulations did not include those beneficiary groups in which the beneficiary status of the spouse changed during the survey year because of death or separation or in which one member of a beneficiary couple was hospitalized for the full year. Since a review of hospital utilization is one of the purposes of the present article, those beneficiary couples in which one member had a full year of hospitalization have been included in these tabulations, as have the beneficiaries separated from their spouses during the survey year. Only the surviving members of beneficiary couples in which the spouse died during the survey year are included in the data. The exclusion of deceased spouses from these highlights follows from the exclusion from the survey itself of all beneficiaries who had died during the survey year. Thus the data reported in this article are concerned only with persons who survived the survey year.