President Trump said uninsured patients diagnosed with coronavirus may receive help from the government in covering health costs.
“We’re looking at that whole situation,” Trump said Tuesday ahead of a briefing at the National Institutes of Health. “There are many people without insurance.”
While Trump did not elaborate, Robert Kadlec, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at Health and Human Services, said in a congressional hearing on Tuesday that the administration is considering using funds from the National Disaster Medical System reimbursement program to help over 25 million people without insurance.
“There would be an interesting way to look at how you can evaluate it in a pandemic or something of this sort to use that,” Kadlec said. “We’re in initial conversations with [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] to understand if that could be utilized in this way.”
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The program reimburses providers up to 110% of Medicare rates to treat patients in areas that have been hit hardest by natural disasters. Hospital emergency room staff must treat patients regardless of their ability to pay, and hospitals are left to deal with costs for uncompensated care.
Health officials have begun discouraging people from going straight to their local hospitals and emergency rooms when they begin exhibiting flulike symptoms, advising instead that they speak to a primary care provider first so that hospitals are not inundated with patients who are not being treated for a more serious illness.
“The strategy that we’re thinking through at [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] is really trying to identify the right level of care for the right situation,” Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the CDC, said in Tuesday’s hearing. “In the circumstances that we could see, keeping people out of the healthcare system physically could be in everybody’s interest.”
There are currently over 100 cases of coronavirus in the United States, and the virus has begun spreading among people who have not traveled to China, where the outbreak originated.
