In a prime-time televised address so filled with barefaced blunders that fact-checkers and the White House struggled to keep up and address the record, President Donald Trump Wednesday night guaranteed that major U.S. insurance agencies “have consented to defer all copayments for coronavirus medications” as the sickness quickly spreads the country over.
A representative for America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), a significant protection industry campaigning gathering, rushed to clarify that, really, organizations are just deferring copays for “testing.” For the individuals who test positive for COVID-19, any treatment will at present come at a (possibly monstrous) cost.
“Insurance agencies exist to make a benefit. They don’t exist to furnish you with social insurance. Benefitting off a pandemic is past unethical.”
— Kim Nelson
Private health insurer: “Yes, you may have a #coronavirus test without meeting your deductible or paying a co-pay.”
Patient: “Ugh, I have the virus!”
Private health insurer: “Good luck with your $8,150 deductible and $1,200 ER co-pay, sucker!” https://t.co/6D0xfptbaE
— Medicare for All (@AllOnMedicare) March 12, 2020
Insurance companies exist to make a profit. They do not exist to provide you with healthcare. Profiting off a pandemic is beyond immoral. https://t.co/5CS69Ja5P2
— Kim Nelson For Congress (@KimforSC) March 12, 2020
“For testing. Not for treatment,” the AHIP spokesperson told Politico healthcare journalist Sarah Owermohle after Trump conveyed his prepared comments, which incorporated a tangled assertion of a brief travel restriction from quite a bit of Europe, sparking widespread confusion and sending markets into an even more profound spiral.
A White House official likewise stepped in to address Trump’s case that insurance agencies consented to defer copays for coronavirus treatment after meeting with the president at the White House on Tuesday.
The mysterious official told CNN’s Jim Acosta that Trump, who read his comments off a teleprompter, intended to state that insurance agencies “have consented to defer all copays on coronavirus testing.”
“Paradise disallows they pass up on an opportunity to bankrupt debilitated people,” tweeted Lori Kearns, an administrative executive for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the most noticeable boss of a policy that would completely eliminate insurance copays, premiums, and deductibles.
The coronavirus flare-up in the U.S. has tossed into sharp alleviation the fundamental imperfections at the core of America’s benefit-driven medicinal services framework, which has left around 30 million individuals totally without protection and several million more with deficient inclusion. As Common Dreams reported, some have been hit a large number of dollars in shock hospital expenses in the wake of looking for coronavirus testing.
“The national medicinal services framework is obviously the most significant device for any nation attempting to ward off a pestilence—all residents should have the option to get tried, get treatment, or be isolated if necessary,” wrote The Week’s Ryan Cooper in a section a week ago. “If and when an antibody is created, the framework needs to disperse it to everybody as quickly as could reasonably be expected. That implies giving it out for nothing in areas the nation over, and maybe making it required if take-up is deficient.”
“The American medicinal services framework falls flat at all of these errands,” Cooper included.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a supporter of Medicare for All, proposed in a tweet Wednesday night that—among different measures—the U.S. government ought to stretch out Medicare or Medicaid inclusion to everybody in the U.S. in the midst of the coronavirus flare-up, which has hit at any rate 34 states and executed in excess of 30 people.
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