healthcare

The term healthcare encompasses a wide range of actions and treatments designed to improve or maintain patients’ health. In many situations, it’s written as two words — health care — and can refer to the whole system that provides medical/wellness care to the population (some people still prefer to write it as one word even when it’s used as an adjective).

A health care provider is a person or facility that provides medical or wellness care to a person or population. This does not include health insurance carriers, which are payers rather than providers. Health insurers facilitate payments for health care providers, but they are not health care providers themselves unless the insurance plan also owns the facility and employs the medical professionals (eg., Kaiser Permanente’s model).