payment lag

Shipments grow by leaps and bounds, while payments lag.

First, the Governor has already begun a payment lag under which state hospitals would receive two fewer checks from the state this year.

Many mothers subsisted for a time on sporadic payments from the fathers, pressuring Navy officials when payments lagged.

Health maintenance organizations have participated in Medicare for more than 15 years, but in the last five years, many have pulled out, saying payments lagged far behind costs.

It brings, say, an airline, which collects its payment as soon as it sells a ticket, and a software company, where payment lags far behind the sale, into the same financial universe.

Her main concern is that as health costs soar and Medicare payments lag, retired people now spend 19 percent of their income, on average, for items, like drugs, that are not covered by Medicare.

As paragraph 26 of the Podestà report states, payments lag behind outstanding commitments by such a margin that the total payments yet to be made exceed the European Union's total annual budget.

In addition, many privately run Medicare plans, known as Medicare H.M.O.'s, withdrew from many areas of the country when government payments lagged, forcing millions of patients to scramble to obtain new coverage.

Increasingly, co-op and condoboards are imposing stricter penalties on late payers and building managers are intervening faster when payments lag, first with informal inquiries, then with legal action that can lead to eviction and foreclosure.

MORTGAGE PAYMENTS LAG - The number of people paying their mortgages late - or not paying them at all - picked up in recent months, a trend that is expected to continue well into next year.

Angry providers, citing payment lags that have some hospitals scrambling to meet payrolls and at least a few doctors taking out loans to cover office expenses, say such numbers reflect a calculated strategy by big managed-care companies to enjoy the "float" on providers' and patients' money.