Washington, May 12 (EFE).- It was not a political party or a social movement, but a virus that led to a pandemic, which made the United States feel closer than ever to the utopia of free universal healthcare. A dream that ends this Friday with his first day without a health emergency.
Although the different social and health programs brought about by the pandemic have been gradually ending in recent months or will end in the coming months, on Thursday, May 11 at 11:59 p.m., he was chosen by the Joe Biden government to mark the official goodbye to the pandemic.
This ends many existing measures in the Families First Coronavirus Response Law created during the emergency, including the simplification of access to Medicaid or free covid tests, vaccines and treatments for the entire population.
“The Government undertook many actions to facilitate access to care for people, regardless of the type of health coverage they had, whether it was Medicare or Medicaid (public assistance programs), private insurance or no insurance,” Juliette told EFE. Cubanski, deputy director of the Medicare Policy Program at the KFF organization.
Although still a long way from the free public health systems of countries like Spain, Switzerland or Singapore, for the last three years in the United States those affected by covid who have required medical attention have been able to receive it without fear of being ruined for life.
A fear that Robert Shaney, 44, felt each of the 14 days he spent in a Texas hospital at the end of 2020 due to pneumonia caused by the virus, he told EFE in a telephone interview.
“I was worried about the money because I had never used the system that I have and I was afraid that they would not pay everything and I would end up owing a lot,” he explains.
He does not have health insurance but rather “something atypical”, Liberty HealthShare, a program created by a Christian organization through which medical expenses are shared among users.
When he left the hospital they only made him pay “about 2,000 dollars.” “They didn’t look for me anymore or ask me for more money. I don’t know if they paid for my program or if it was the government, but they didn’t give me any more bills and I didn’t want to ask any more,” she says. His treatment, he estimates, may have cost “at least a quarter of a million dollars.”
Marino Peter Stathakis, 33, has one tangible memory of the two and a half months he was hospitalized for complications from the coronavirus: a stack of sheets “the size of a pack of paper you buy for printer,” he explained to EFE.
A mountain of invoices with a final figure: 2 million dollars. Behind them is a dramatic story that tells of days in a coma plugged into a respirator, complex surgeries and exhausting weeks of recovery for a body totally massacred by the virus.
“I am an anomaly, a miracle,” he tells EFE today, relieved to see that he hardly has any sequelae. Thanks to the fact that he was covered by his mother’s insurance, they had to pay only the deductible: about $3,000.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of people without health insurance in the United States in 2019 was 33 million (10.2% of the population). In 2020 this figure dropped to 31.6 million (9.7%) and in 2021 to 28.1 (8.6%).
This reduction was due in part to easier access to Medicaid, a program that provides health insurance for adults and children with limited income and resources. According to KFF data, between February 2020 and March 2023 enrollment in this program grew by approximately 20 million people.
Now, points out the independent non-profit organization focused on national health issues, a total of 17 million people could lose coverage in the coming months after the end of the health emergency.
These three years, Cubanski points out, represented “an ideal that had not really been seen in the country before the pandemic.”
“Frankly, we may not see it again, because we have a very fragmented health care system, where we know that the health care you receive depends to some extent on the type of insurance you have and how much you pay,” he says.
Far from what one might think, the leftist legislator Bernie Sanders was able to verify in 2020, in the last pre-campaign for the presidency in which he participated, that the majority of Americans are not in favor of the universal public health system.
Labeled as “radical” by conservatives, he also failed to convince Democrats of the dream of ending the tyranny of insurers and his proposal “Medicare for all” did not go beyond an ideal, which the country ended up touching when a virus put everything upside down and that today is completely behind.
Paula Escalada Medrano
