Congress passed a law to cover the cost of coronavirus testing for Americans by saddling insurance companies with the responsibility of paying for the tests themselves. The cost of the test would be determined by the cash value of whatever the onlie cost of the tests were by the provider they were contracting to administer the tests. The result has been a 25 percent increase in the cost of coronavirus tests from last year to this year, 2021.
The next shoe to drop will be the rise in insurance premiums as insurance companies pass on the cost of government’s promise to the very people the government was allegedly serving. To be fair, there will be a significant segment of society that will get access to this, as of right now, essential service for whom free access could be argued to be necessary, but we need not profoundly affect an essential market so signfiicantly with these simplistic solutions to short term problems to meet the needs of those who truly need it.
I won’t offer a solution in this moment, but there are many that don’t involve solutions that turn out to be no solution for the vast majority of people the government promised would get free testing, only to pay for it in the long run after all. That’s not actually a solution at all, is it? I can easily compete with ‘not a solution,’ and I bet many of our readers can as well.
Covid Rapid Test Prices: How a Law Allows Labs to Charge Any Price
From www.nytimes.com
2021-09-26 09:00:14
Excerpt:
At the drugstore, a rapid Covid test usually costs less than $20.
Across the country, over a dozen testing sites owned by the start-up company GS Labs regularly bill $380.
There’s a reason they can. When Congress tried to ensure that Americans wouldn’t have to pay for coronavirus testing, it required insurers to pay certain laboratories whatever “cash price” they listed online for the tests, with no limit on what that might be.
GS Labs’s high prices and growing presence — it has performed a half-million rapid tests since the pandemic’s start, and still runs thousands daily — show how the government’s longstanding reluctance to play a role in health prices has hampered its attempt to protect consumers. As a result, Americans could ultimately pay some of the cost of expensive coronavirus tests in the form of higher insurance premiums.
.jpg%2F440px-Joe_Biden_(49385177488).jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=de57f84e36140bdf38dd675f62b9f44b31da651a15318af4c836531440a7828c&ipo=images)
