Robbie Whelan
speaker
85 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2020
last heard Sep 2020
Robbie Whelan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
They've had to pull their kids out of the private Catholic school where they go and
It's nothing to sniff at to say that somebody has to pay a few thousand or several dozen thousand dollars in out-of-pocket costs.
Paperwork is a big issue.
When you apply, if you're uninsured in particular and you need to ask a hospital for financial assistance or to avail themselves of these federal funds that are available to treat COVID-19, cover those costs, it's almost like this maze of paperwork you have to go through.
And for a lot of COVID-19 patients, especially the long-term ones, they're suffering from what a lot of them call brain fog, which is sort of a long-term confusion, forgetfulness, or fatigue, or they've lost their jobs and they need to spend a lot of their time trying to figure out how to make ends meet in other ways.
Going through this long process of getting paperwork, arguing with hospitals and providers, arguing with insurers,
arguing with the government about about um what your situation is can be really you know a big burden on a lot of families another issue that i've had a lot of reader feedback about is the issue of whether or not particular problems that are treated in hospitals are caused by coven 19. so in order in order to have your costs covered if you're uninsured for example
you have to have a COVID-19 diagnosis.
You have to have a positive test.
But I spoke to one guy, for example, who became ill in March.
And at that point, the testing capacity just wasn't there to do a quick test.
So by the time he was able to get a test, and actually it was three tests in this case, they all said negative because the virus had left his system by that time.
And he's got letters from his doctor saying he had severe lung damage from what is most likely COVID-19.
But when it came to getting those costs covered with his insurer, there were all kinds of problems because cost sharing has only been waived for this one illness.
And it sort of speaks to this sort of patchwork system as one of my subjects in the story called it, a patchwork system of universal health care, but only for one illness.
And it's really something that a lot of Americans have been advocating for for a long time is universal health care.
But in a time of crisis, it seems we've only sort of set up a system that kind of looks like that for COVID-19.
Right.
In the universe of people who are unfortunate enough to get sick with the coronavirus, people who have good insurance through their employers are the luckiest.
And the reason for that is because at the beginning of the pandemic, almost every big insurer said,
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