Exercise, for instance, is absolutely crucial when it comes to living a long and healthy life. Not only does exercise burn calories and keep you at a healthy weight (hiking for just one mile, for instance, can burn as many as five hundred calories, a truly impressive amount by any means) but it can also help to strengthen your body as a whole. In fact, just participating in a mere seven hours of physical activity each and every week – that’s just one hour a day – has been proven to increase the average person’s life expectancy.

In addition to regular exercise, a healthy and well rounded diet is a key component of any healthy lifestyle. Too frequently too many of us turn to junk food and fast food, simply because they are hugely convenient (as well as taste quite good) and it is easy to consume a lot of such foods in a short span of time, as they typically don’t require much preparation on behalf of the consumer, if really any at all. Instead, using whole foods is likely to have a tremendously positive impact on your health, from whole grains to fresh fruits and vegetables.

But sometimes, the need for catastrophic health insurance happens anyway. Emergencies happen, and visits to the emergency room are far from cheap. In fact, the typical emergency room visit has been show to cost more than one thousand and two hundred dollars at the time that this article was written. For someone who does not have catastrophic health insurance, there’s no doubt about it that this cost could be just totally devastating. But fortunately, catastrophic health insurance is becoming more popular than ever before.

However, it is also important to assess whether or not you need to visit an emergency room in the first place. After all, the data shows that more than forty percent of all people want to seek care from their primary care physician first before going to an emergency room location. However, the emergency room can often seem to be the only option for any kind of medical treatment if you develop a concerning medical condition or symptoms after the hours of typical operation for your average primary car physician’s office.

Fortunately, urgent care centers have become more popular and widespread than ever before here in the United States, and many health care plans are accepted there are as well. Open earlier into the morning and later into the evening (and sometimes even all hours of the day and night), urgent care centers can provide a cost effective alternative to the emergency room for many communities all throughout the country. And the services provided at the typical urgent care location are often more comprehensive than many people realize, with less than five percent of all cases that are seen there actually needing to be transferred to the nearest emergency room.

But having all of your bases covered is hugely important, and this is where catastrophic health insurance comes into play. Catastrophic health insurance will be vital in cases of severe injury or illness for which an emergency room visit becomes simply unavoidable. In such cases, those who do not have catastrophic health insurance are even likely to avoid health care altogether in order to avoid accruing such a cost. There’s no need to say that this can prove life threatening for many people of all different ages and backgrounds all throughout the country.

Health insurance is important, and no more so than here in America. Catastrophic health insurance is even more crucial to protecting your health in as full and as comprehensive a way as possible.

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