All Americans could get access to COVID-19 testing and treatment if a public health crisis insurance program based on Medicare was put in place, according to an opinion article published by USA Today.
The op-ed, penned by Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins researchers Joshua Sharfstein, MD, Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo and Gerard Anderson, PhD, said today's health insurance infrastructure isn't best suited to handle a pandemic like COVID-19. A "lack of coherence" among plans like varying coverage rules, prior authorization requirements, cost-sharing rules and network limitations "will undermine the national response" to COVID-19, the authors wrote.
To the academics, there are several advantages to instituting a public health crisis insurance program modeled on Medicare's billing structure. These include greater access to care as members won't have to search for in-network providers, better billing processes for hospitals and labs that are used to billing Medicare, and better data that comes with a single billing system that can aggregate information in one spot.
"The novel coronavirus poses a serious threat to the entire U.S. population. The confusing tangle of payers is already tying the hands of the nation. A focused coverage program for everyone can finance, inform, and sustain the crisis response that America needs," the authors concluded.
Read the full op-ed here.
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