The financial cost of other COVID-19 vaccines is increasing. Health insurance providers now ask people who contract the disease to share the cost of treatment, which can be costly if it requires a long hospital stay.
At the start of the pandemic, most private insurers waived their share of patients ’costs according to their plans or even covered the full cost of treatment. By November 2020, nearly 90% of insured people would have received their costs, including copayments, co-insurance, or deductible payments, if they had been hospitalized by COVID-19, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Foundation family ( KFF).
But with effective coronavirus vaccines available, most insurers no longer waive those costs, according to KFF. The change reflects a broader push by U.S. companies to push workers to inoculate themselves in hopes of withholding medical expenses. To that end, Delta Air Lines said this week that it would charge unvaccinated employees An extra $ 200 a month for health coverage.
The insurer’s profits skyrocketed during the pandemic, as consumers skipped routine care and delayed election procedures.
“Health insurance companies spent far less than expected because during the pandemic. No one went to the hospital, election procedures were delayed and insurers had more money than was supposed to,” Matthew Rae said. , director of the Health Care Program. Market at KFF.
Today, by contrast, more than 70 percent of the country’s largest insurers no longer waive the costs of COVID-19 treatment, according to Kaiser, who surveyed each state’s two largest insurers and Washington, DC. Another 10% of plans plan to phase out cost sharing by the end of October.
Vaccines are preventive medicine
The rationale is simple: subsidizing the treatment of patients with COVID-19 is contrary to efforts to encourage Americans to take preventive care of the disease. The hospitalization rate of unvaccinated COVID patients is 29 times higher than that of vaccinated patients, according to a report by the Center for Disease and Prevention.
“Now that COVID-19 can be largely avoided for most adults and employers are putting a lot of pressure on people to get vaccinated, it makes much less sense that these employers are giving people who get infected a break. Rae told CBS MoneyWatch.
However, patients will not be responsible for the total cost of treatment, which can be as high as $ 50,000 for a serious case. Fully insured patients hospitalized with pneumonia (which involves treatment similar to that of people with COVID-19) usually have to pay about $ 1,300, for example.
“The cost of hospitalization for COVID-19 is tens of thousands of dollars, but most people admitted to the hospital, even if they pay the cost-sharing, are only responsible for a fraction of it. it’s like they’re affected by a big bill, ”Rae said.