U.S. Clinics, hospitals brace for end of federal covid coverage for the uninsured

Clinics, hospitals brace for end of cushion for uninsured covid care Christina Paz was typing up notes about a patient she'd just seen at Centro San Vicente, El Paso's largest community health center, when an email from Washington showed up. "Lord," she thought as she read it at the clinic's nursing station. "Oh, my God." The brief email told Paz, a nurse practitioner who is the clinic's chief executive officer, that at 11:59 p.m. on March 22 the federal COVID-19 Uninsured Program would stop accepting claims for testing and treating for the deadly virus on patien YahooNews

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... more than 50,000 providers of health services nationwide ... have run out of time to claim reimbursement from the Department of Health and Human Services for coronavirus testing and care of those without health coverage. And another deadline nears - April 5 - to submit charges for vaccinating the uninsured. ...

The wind-down of the uninsured program is among the first concrete casualties of a decision by Congress this month to exclude about $15 billion in pandemic relief from a large spending plan adopted for other parts of the government and the Ukraine war.

The Biden administration has been trying to draw attention to the consequences if lawmakers continue bickering over whether to provide more coronavirus aid. The White House and health officials say the government will not have enough vaccines to give every American a fourth shot to protect against the virus, if federal regulators approve the additional booster, and soon will lack money to buy additional monoclonal antibodies to treat coronavirus infections.

Those pandemic-fighting hindrances could lie in the near future. The uninsured program already is ending.

Since it was created in spring 2020 as one of several pools of pandemic aid for health care providers, the uninsured program has provided more than $20 billion in reimbursements to medical labs, hospitals, doctor's offices, pharmacies and clinics. But as it winds down, its absence - unless Congress acts - will be felt most keenly in the health care system's safety net, focused on patients who have no health coverage. Often, those patients are low-income Black Americans or Latinos whose communities have been scarred by the greatest illness and death from the pandemic.

They are places like Harris Health System in Houston, which runs Ben Taub and Lyndon B. Johnson hospitals and a network of clinics. Of more than 16,000 patients with covid admitted to one of those hospitals or treated by a Harris facility as outpatients, 47% have been uninsured.

Without the federal program, "there is no way we would have been able to care for the number of patients we've cared for," said Esmaeil Porsa, Harris's chief executive officer. At one point, covid patients filled 22 of the 23 intensive care beds at LBJ, the smaller hospital.

"I was basically running a covid hospital," Porsa said. ...