Health insurance reimbursed credit card
OwnerDonald SPECTORinventor
Life of this patent
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Abstract
An improved computerized method for provides credit card services by a card issuer. The improvement operates in connection with health insurance offered to the cardholder. In this context, the cardholder has an account with the card issuer and the improvement includes storing, in association with the account, data associated with the cardholder's insurance policy. It also includes processing incoming merchant charges to be posted to the account to flag any charge identified as covered by insurance and to store such charge as flagged. Finally it includes deferring billing of any flagged charge, pending settlement of such flagged charge under an arrangement with the insurer.
Claims9
An improved computerized method for providing credit card services by a card issuer, such method being of the type employing computerized processing of a stream of incoming merchant charges to be posted and stored as debits to a cardholder's account and to generate a bill of the posted charges on a periodic basis to the cardholder, wherein the improvement operates in connection with health insurance provided to the cardholder by an insurer, the cardholder having an account with the card issuer, and the improvement comprises:
- storing, in association with the account, data associated with an insurance policy of the cardholder;
- processing incoming merchant charges to be posted to the account to flag any charge identified as pertaining to a covered charge by the associated data and to store such charge as flagged;
- filing a claim with the insurer for the flagged charge;
- and
- deferring billing of any flagged charge, pending settlement of such flagged charge under an arrangement with the insurer.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.