Why It ’s Still So Complicated to Get Free Home Covid Tests

This week, nearly two full years into the on-going pandemic, the Biden Administration told Americans that they would, at long last, be given access to free, rapid COVID-19 tests — a key tool in containing the spread of the virus. The government’s plan was two-fold. First, on Jan. 15, federal agencies implemented new rules requiring private health insurers to cover at-home tests. And second, on Jan. 18, the feds launched a new website to deliver free rapid antigen tests directly to Americans’ homes. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The effort was a major step in the right direction, public health experts say. But it has also been kludgy, overly-complicated—and it doesn’t go nearly far enough, they say. “It’s a well intentioned effort to try to give people some financial relief,” says Sabrina Corlette, a research professor and co-director of Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms. “But I think it is a highly inefficient, cumbersome and confusing way to go about it.” The new federal rules require private insurers to pay for eight tests per person each month, people have to get them at specific locations to have their costs covered up-front, and those new rules don’t apply to the tens of millions of people who are on Medicare, Medicaid or are uninsured. The federal website, for its part, won’t ship antigen tests for 7-12 days — too late to address the spike in new c...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news