Jamie Azar left a rehab hospital in Tennessee this week with the help of a walker after spending the entire month of August in the ICU and on a ventilator. She had received a shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in mid-July but tested positive for the coronavirus within 11 days and nearly died, The Washington Post reported. Now Azar is facing thousands of dollars in medical expenses that she can’t afford. In 2020, as the pandemic took hold, U.S. health insurance companies declared they would cover 100% of the costs for COVID treatment, waiving co-pays and expensive deductibles for hospital stays that frequently range into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But this year, most insurers have reinstated co-pays and deductibles for COVID patients, in many cases even before vaccines became widely available. The companies imposed the costs as industry profits remained strong or grew in 2020, with insurers paying out less to cover elective procedures that hospitals suspended during the crisis. Now the financial burden of COVID is falling unevenly on patients across the country, varying widely by health care plan and geography.If you live in Vermont or New Mexico, state mandates require insurance companies to cover 100% of treatment. But most Americans with COVID are now exposed to the uncertainty, confusion and expense of business-as-usual medical billing and insurance practices — joining those with cancer, diabetes and other serious, costly illnesses. (Insurers continue to waive costs associated with vaccinations and testing, a pandemic benefit the federal government requires.) A widow with no children, Azar is part of the unlucky majority. Her experience is a sign of what to expect if COVID, as most scientists fear, becomes endemic: a permanent, regular health threat. The carrier for her employee health insurance, UnitedHealthcare, reinstated patient cost-sharing Jan. 31. That means, because she got sick months later, she could be on the hook for $5,500 in deductibles, co-pays and out-of-network charges this year, including her ICU stay, according to estimates by her family. They anticipate she could face another $5,500 in uncovered expenses next year as her recovery continues.
