The days of full covid coverage are over.

[Zorro]

The days of full covid coverage are over. Insurers are restoring deductibles and co-pays, leaving patients with big bills.

Large insurance companies waived cost-sharing for coronavirus care in 2020, but it has sprung back in 2021

Jamie Azar left a rehab hospital in Tennessee this week with the help of a walker after spending the entire month of August in the ICU and on a ventilator. She had received a shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in mid-July but tested positive for the coronavirus within 11 days and nearly died.

Now Azar, who earns about $36,000 a year as the director of a preschool at a Baptist church in Georgia, is facing thousands of dollars in medical expenses that she can’t afford.

“I’m very thankful to be home. I am still weak. And I’m just waiting for the bills to come in to know what to do with them,” she said Wednesday, after returning home.

In 2020, as the pandemic took hold, U.S. health insurance companies declared they would cover 100 percent of the costs for covid treatment, waiving co-pays and expensive deductibles for hospital stays that frequently range into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/09/18/covid-hospital-bills-insurance-deductible/