WEDNESDAY, June 9, 2021 (HealthDay News) – COVID-19 could be a much more expensive experience for people who get sick this year thanks to the return of deductibles and co-payments, according to new research.
Most people who got seriously ill with COVID last year didn’t have crushing medical bills because almost all insurance companies agreed to waive coronavirus treatment co-payments at the height of the pandemic, said Dr. Kao-Ping Chua, a health policy researcher and pediatrician at the University of Michigan.
But some people got big bills because their insurer refused to waive the co-payment, and their debts give a good idea of what many hospitalized COVID patients will have to pay this year, Chua said.
“We’ve had some really big insurers this year that have given up their co-payment benefits,” said Chua. “Insurers appear to be acting like the pandemic is over and we think it is premature to act like that.”
Chua noted that around 20,000 Americans had been hospitalized for COVID as of last week, although cases have continued to decline.
For this study, Chua and his colleagues reviewed claims data from several insurers in the United States, specifically looking for people who received a full bill for their COVID hospitalization.
They identified more than 4,000 hospital stays between March and September 2020 in which the insurer did not appear to waive co-payment. These patients had to pay for part of their total care, from the hospital room to meals, to the doctors who saw them and the drugs they received.
The data showed that people who did not benefit from the co-payment exemption paid an average of about $ 3,800 out of pocket when they had private insurance and an average of $ 1,500 when they were covered by a Medicare Advantage plan. Plan were covered.
“Now that insurers are giving up their co-payment benefits, the bills for patients covered by plans that have chosen to do so could be about this,” Chua said.
In comparison, respiratory infections in the pre-COVID period from 2016 to 2019 resulted in average self-spending for privately insured individuals of $ 1,600 to $ 2,000, researchers said in background notes.
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