Sarah Krouse
speaker
133 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2018
last heard Aug 2020
Sarah Krouse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The companies that want to be able to do this are saying, we're trying to get ahead of the ball, we're trying to get ahead of the problem, and it's very expensive for us.
Their rules are not consistent across states.
Different states require that testing be covered for different types of workers, if at all.
So in general, the federal government has said that insurers do not have to cover the cost of testing if it is as part of a broad sort of return to work type screening.
If a person has symptoms, if they have had a known contact with someone who's sick, yes, insurers have to cover it.
If it's just a regular sort of ongoing check,
They don't.
And subsequent to that, states have issued their own guidance on whether, for example, nursing home worker testing should be reimbursed or child care worker testing.
In general, companies that wish to test their workers are paying for it out of their own pockets or profits.
So many large companies are what's called self-insured, meaning they pay for all of their health care costs.
For smaller businesses, this is becoming an additional expense that they have to pay on the side because in general, regular workplace testing does not have to be covered by insurers.
And even within the state guidance, so for example, like in West Virginia, insurers are
have to cover the cost of workplace testing for child care or nursing home workers without imposing any cost sharing, meaning the worker wouldn't have to pay a copay or meet a deductible.
But in other states like California, the worker may have to pay a copay or pay to meet a deductible.
It could, and this is something that small businesses have said is troubling them.
I spoke for this story to a company in Connecticut called Mott Corp that's paying more than $30,000 per month to test 150 employees every other week.
And that is coming out of their profits.
So there is a push among some human resources and other trade groups to ask Congress to provide additional federal funding to help pay for workplace COVID testing.
And the reason all of this matters is one of the tricky things about COVID-19 is the potential for asymptomatic transmission, meaning you can be sick and infected and not know it and therefore go to work and potentially infect your colleagues.
So the companies that want to be able to do this are saying, we're trying to get ahead of the ball, we're trying to get ahead of the problem, and it's very expensive for us.
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