a wordCo-payment
also: copay · copayment · patient contribution · user charge
American plans say copay. European systems say patient contribution or user charge. All three name the same thing: the part the patient pays on a bill somebody else is also paying.
A fixed sum the patient pays for a covered service while the payer pays the rest. The US federal glossary puts it plainly: "A fixed amount ($20, for example) you pay for a covered health care service after you've paid your deductible." The word only means anything where somebody else is paying the remainder.
First seen. c. 1200 for pay; this project could not date the insurance compound from a dictionary
A co-payment is a fixed amount. Coinsurance is a percentage. A deductible is an amount paid before cover begins at all. Trade writing uses the three interchangeably and they behave very differently on a large bill. Cited · etymonline-pay
The story Cited
Set against its two neighbours the word becomes readable. Coinsurance is "The percentage of costs of a covered health care service you pay (20%, for example) after you've paid your deductible" — on a $100 allowed amount at 20%, the patient pays $20. A deductible is paid first and in full. A fixed co-payment is predictable and a percentage is not, and on an operation rather than an office visit the difference is the whole argument.
Inference — the word is a poor fit for cross-border care and is used there anyway. A co-payment presupposes a payer with a schedule. A patient paying a foreign hospital has no payer and no schedule, so the correct word for what they hand over is not a co-payment but the whole price.
How it works Inference
Three things decide what a co-payment costs over a year: whether it is a flat sum or a percentage, whether it counts towards an annual cap, and whether the service is in the payer's network at all. The third question answers itself for a hospital in another country.
Today Inference
As of 17 September 2026 no record on this site carries a co-payment figure as a price. Where a state's user charge is the whole of what a patient pays — the English dental bands, for instance — the amount is recorded as a tariff and named as one.
The particulars
| region | Everywhere |
|---|---|
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-17 |
What it connects to
Pages that point here
Sources
- pay (v.) — etymology — Online Etymology Dictionary, compiled by Douglas Harper · link (read 2026-09-17)
- Copayment — glossary — HealthCare.gov, US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services · link (read 2026-09-17)
- Coinsurance — glossary — HealthCare.gov, US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services · link (read 2026-09-17)
- Understanding NHS dental charges — bands 1, 2 and 3 — NHS (England) · link (read 2026-09-16)
Where it came from: Cited a source named here · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Trade practice how the trade works, hedged · Inference this project's own reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.