COVID Testing a Windfall for Hospitals, Labs, and Others medscape.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from medscape.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
high prices and pushback from state regulators.
The listed charge for a basic PCR COVID test at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles is $480. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital lists $440 as the gross charge as well as the cash price. Those amounts are far above the $159 national average for the diagnostic test, which predominated during the first year of the pandemic, at more than 3,000 hospitals checked by HPS.
Colorado Moves to Scrap Plan to Establish Public Option
Christopher Furlong/Getty
30 Apr 2021
Colorado state officials struck a compromise with the healthcare industry not to establish a state public option, which raises questions about the political feasibility of the healthcare reform proposal.
Colorado state Democrat legislators announced Monday they had struck a deal to scrap plans to establish a public option and instead mandate lower health insurance premiums for Coloradans to buy insurance on the individual or small-group markets.
A public option would allow for government-run health insurance plans to compete against private health insurance plans.
Healthcare experts such as Sally Pipes, the president of the Pacific Research Institute, said a public insurance option competing alongside private insurance would eventually crowd out private health insurance because government-run insurance could operate on a “loss indefinitely.”
What a difference a year makes in Colorado’s case for a public option plan
Before the pandemic, Colorado looked set to become the second state to pass what s known as a public option health insurance plan, which would have forced hospitals that lawmakers said were raking in obscene profits to accept lower payments. But when covid-19 struck, legislators hit pause.
Now, after a year of much public lionizing of doctors and other health professionals on the front lines of the covid fight, it s a lot harder to make the case hospitals are fleecing patients. It is much more difficult now that we have this narrative of the health care heroes, said Sarah McAfee, director of communications for the Center for Health Progress, a Denver-based health advocacy organization that pushed for the public option. Part of this is separating the two: The people who are providing the health care are not the same as the corporations who are focused on the bottom line.