Testing Workers for Covid-19: Who Should Pay?
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Here's your money briefing for Friday, August 7th. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. For businesses, testing employees for the coronavirus is key to reopening safely and maintaining a healthy workplace. But it's also expensive. And many small businesses are finding that their insurance doesn't always cover the cost.
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.
So who does the law say should be paying for these tests?
Who is responsible for paying workplace COVID-19 tests under federal guidance?
We'll ask our health care reporter, Sarah Krause, after the break.
The cost of testing employees for COVID-19 can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But who should be footing the bill? Insurance? The company? Or the employees themselves? Health care reporter Sarah Krause is here with us to discuss. So, Sarah, do all states have the same rules here? And how does that change who's responsible for paying?
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.
How do large and small businesses deal with this?
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.
That's got to be a huge burden on small businesses.
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.
Now, what's the push and pull between businesses and insurance companies regarding testing asymptomatic employees? You know, they've got to be tested also to ensure they don't become contagious down the line.
So from a company perspective, one of the arguments that executives have said to me is we're trying to get ahead of outbreaks. We don't want to be in a situation where a lot of our employees end up getting sick, which then ends up being a bigger health care cost down the road, a loss of productivity. We may need to shut down on the insurer side. they often comply with what the federal or state governments say they are responsible for paying for. So they may not want to be in a situation where they are paying for weekly or biweekly testing of hundreds or thousands of employees
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