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| People who don’t have health insurance are now being charged $100 or more for Covid testing by some labs and may face bills for hospital treatment, and free vaccines may not be as easy for everyone to get since emergency federal aid for some pandemic programs has run out and hasn’t been renewed by Congress. |
| Funding for the uninsured was dropped by Senate and House negotiators after Republicans opposed the money needed to extend the program, a senior Democratic aide in the US House told CNBC. |
| Meanwhile, the Health Resources and Services Administration, which runs the uninsured program for HHS, stopped accepting claims to test and treat uninsured Covid patients on March 22 due to insufficient funds. While the US is providing Covid shots for free, the agency stopped covering the costs to administer the vaccines for uninsured people as of April 5. |
| Several major testing companies are now charging the uninsured. Quest Diagnostics told CNBC uninsured people now have to pay at least $100 for a PCR test, which is the most accurate one. Labcorp told CNBC the company is charging $119 for its PCR testing for people who aren’t covered by insurance. Curative, which runs thousands of testing sites across 34 states, said it can no longer provide free Covid testing to the uninsured in areas of the country where state or local governments aren't picking up the tab. |
| Without additional federal money, people in the US will face a dramatic reduction in access to testing, particularly the uninsured, that will likely result in Covid outbreaks that were preventable, according to Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. |
| Uninsured people who become hospitalized with Covid could also face bills for their treatment now that the federal government is no longer reimbursing hospitals, according to Molly Smith with the American Hospital Association. Smith said treating someone with Covid can cost anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars if the patient ends up on a mechanical ventilator. |
| Some hospitals have financial assistance plans for the uninsured, Smith said. However, there is growing concern that some patients simply won’t go to the hospital when they need treatment for Covid because they’re worried about how much it will now cost. |
| There were 28 million uninsured people in the US in 2020, according to the most current data available from the Census Bureau. The current number of uninsured is likely lower due to a record 14.2 million people signing up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act as of January this year, about 2 million more people than the previous record of 12.6 million set in 2016. |
| The uninsured are often people of color and lower-income workers who have jobs that put them at higher risk of infection because they are work in industries such as retail, restaurant and grocery stores where they interact with the public and can’t stay at home, according to Jennifer Tolbert, an expert on the uninsured at the Kaiser Family Foundation. |
| While Covid cases are low right now in the US compared to the peak of the winter omicron wave, barriers to testing will leave these communities more vulnerable again if another wave hits the US, Tolbert said. Curative said its real-time data points to another potential surge on the horizon. |
| The uninsured program, established at the start of the pandemic under the Trump administration, has paid out about $20 billion in claims since 2020, according to HRSA. Tolbert said about 60% of that money went toward testing, 31% for Covid treatments, and 9% for the administrative costs of vaccinations. |
| "The truth is that unfortunately the uninsured are the last to be thought about and the first to get the negative outcomes when we decide to pull back,” Benjamin said. |
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