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
Um, decided to waive what are called cost sharing agreements with patients.
So if you, after a certain amount of money is paid after your deductibles met, you suddenly have to pay you under normal circumstances have to pay 20%, for example, of your, of your costs after that point.
Those agreements have all been waived and the insurer is now covering 100% of the treatment cost after a deductible has been met in general.
So if you have a private health insurance plan, you're in pretty good shape.
And the reason why the insurers are able to offer to do this and cover these costs at 100% is
is because COVID-19 has actually been really great for a lot of insurers.
And the reason for that is because fewer people are going to the hospital and having elective surgeries, for example, things like a hip replacement that are typically very costly to insurers.
when they have to pick up the bill for that.
But if fewer people are going to the hospital because they're worried about getting exposed to the virus, that means fewer elective surgeries, lower cost to insurers.
And you're seeing it in the insurer's earnings.
I mean, a lot of the insurers are really going gangbusters on revenue.
But obviously, that won't last forever.
There is a range of estimates that is so broad it's almost unuseful, but basically the insurance industry has said that it's going to cost between $30 and $500 billion over two years to cover the cost of treatment of the disease.
Another clue we have is from the provider relief funds, which as I mentioned earlier, started at $175 billion, but have been drawn down to about $60 billion at this point.
While we don't know exactly how much treatment is going to cost, it's going to be somewhere in the range of several hundred billion dollars.
There's always room for improvement in the U.S.
healthcare system, but there is a lot of worry actually about what happens in the fall if we don't have a vaccine yet and if a second wave hits.
And the reason for that is because most of these waivers for cost-sharing agreements by the private insurers are set to expire at some point in October or around the autumn.
And if those waivers are not extended, then we might start seeing really big bills come due for a lot of patients.
Same goes for the provider relief funds.
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