ATLANTA – America’s three-year experiment with an approximation of European-style universal health care will come to an end May 11 when the federal public health emergency brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic expires.
A series of health-care and insurance-coverage provisions that were put in place to deal with the pandemic are about to go away, which experts in the field say will make it just as hard to access care for many as it was before coronavirus struck Georgia and the nation.
“As we transition into the new normal, we are returning mostly to our fragmented health system as we knew it,” said Jen Kates, director of global health at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
One casualty of that “new normal” will be an immediate end to free at-home COVID tests for most Georgians. Those enrolled in Medicaid will continue to get free tests but only until September. The good news on that front is that COVID vaccines will continue to be free for Medicaid enrollees and the uninsured under a $1 billion Biden administration program.
Continuing to offer free vaccines to that group makes sense because low-income Georgians on Medicaid or without insurance coverage of any sort tend to work in jobs where the risk of exposure to COVID is greater than to others who can work from home, said Leah Chan, senior health policy analyst with the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, an Atlanta-based nonprofit.
“It’s important keeping it in place for a longer period of time,” she said.
Telehealth services took off during the pandemic, as patients and physicians sought to reduce their exposure to COVID-19. Health-care providers stepped up their offerings of telehealth, and insurance companies proved more willing to cover those services.
While the end of the public health emergency will limit coverage of some telehealth services, Chan said states are…
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