Biden on Covid. "You're on your own."

Our Florida vacation is winding down. We head home to frigid Chicago this weekend.

Coming from Illinois, Florida is a strange place in regards to Covid. Florida’s Governor and leading presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has rejected any regulations regarding Covid protection. He’s been a no on mask mandates and vaccination mandates even during the worst of the pandemic.

Public safety is one more woke idea to the Florida governor.

Ironically, DeSantis has found an echo in the Biden adminstrations’s new Covid policy.

On Monday, the White House announced that they are ending the official Covid Emergency in mid-May.

It will end what has been largely free access to all Covid related healthcare.

For those lucky enough like me to have health insurance (mine is a state subsidized retirement Medicare Advantage plan) testing, future boosters and care if I get Covid will be mostly, but not entirely paid for.

Older folks on Medicare will still be eligible for free vaccines, but will likely share the cost of treatments like Pfizer Inc.’s Paxlovid, Merck & Co.’s Molnupiravir, and Gilead Sciences Inc.’s Remdesivir and tests.

Those who are uninsured will be most impacted.

The public health emergency declaration included provisions that allowed hospitals and healthcare providers to seek reimbursement through Medicaid after treating uninsured people for Covid.

Now we revert to treating Covid with our same old, inequitable, privatized healthcare system.

In other words, uninsured patients will be on the hook for all the costs.

Things began to go down hill when when federal funding for the program began to dry up last spring.

Now, the number of uninsured people could grow by the millions as pandemic-era provisions that ensured continuous enrollment in Medicaid lapse.

Today, roughly 500 Americans are dying each day from COVID-19.

SARS-CoV-2 will be the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2023—about triple the threat of influenza.

Privatized healthcare sucks.