A federal plan to require health insurers to cover the cost of at-home tests is not yet in effect. But there are other options.
Earlier this month, the Biden administration announced that it would soon require private health insurers to reimburse consumers for the cost of at-home coronavirus tests. It was a step toward improving access to the tests, which remain more expensive in the United States than in Europe, where they are often distributed for little or no cost. But the Biden plan has not yet gone into effect, and the cost of repeated rapid tests, which begins at $7 per test, can quickly add up. “It still is too expensive for the typical American household to be rapid testing everyone in the household every week,” said Zoe McLaren, a health policy expert at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. With the holidays fast approaching, are there ways to reduce the financial burden of testing? There are, but they may require both legwork and luck, experts said. Not yet. The administration has said that it plans to issue its rules for reimbursement by Jan.15, and the plan will go into effect sometime after that. The administration has already said that the plan will not provide retroactive reimbursement for tests that have already been purchased, which means that any tests you buy for the holidays will not be covered. “That reimbursement plan is not going to really help us over the holidays, when obviously the risk of transmission is highest,” Ms. McLaren said. Still, since the final rules have not yet been issued, there is “certainly no harm” in saving the receipts from any tests you buy in the next month or so, just in case, said Sabrina Corlette, the co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. But you should not count on being reimbursed, she said. The process and requirements for reimbursement are still unclear; people should wait for more information from the Biden administration and insurers in January, experts said.
