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For the Uninsured, COVID Care Has Entered a New Stage of Crisis
WASHINGTON — When Mandy Alderman caught the coronavirus in June for a second time, she hoped her usual primary care physician could prescribe a monoclonal antibody treatment or Paxlovid, the antiviral pill that has been shown to reduce the severity of an infection. But without health insurance...
www.yahoo.com
WASHINGTON — When Mandy Alderman caught the coronavirus in June for a second time, she hoped her usual primary care physician could prescribe a monoclonal antibody treatment or Paxlovid, the antiviral pill that has been shown to reduce the severity of an infection. But without health insurance, she could not afford a visit.
Alderman, 44, a former medical assistant in Lawrenceville, Georgia, found a doctor willing to prescribe a cocktail of other drugs, but not the proven COVID-19 medications she wanted. She took what she could get. She had to lean on her aunt for the $85 it cost to retrieve the drugs from a Publix grocery store pharmacy near her home.
“I felt like I was irrelevant,” Alderman said, recounting the ordeal. “I felt like I didn’t matter.”
Difficulty getting care for COVID-19 has become an increasingly common problem for poor, uninsured Americans. After paying about $25 billion to health care providers over the course of the pandemic to reimburse them for vaccinating, testing and treating people without insurance, the federal government is running low on funds for COVID care for the nearly 30 million Americans who are uninsured.