Medicare is here to help during the COVID-19 emergency. Your health, safety, and welfare are our highest priority. Remember, if you don’t need to go out, it‘s important to stay home to help slow the spread of COVID-19.
To help you get the health care you need, while reducing your risk of exposure, Medicare has further temporarily expanded its coverage of telehealth services — allowing doctors and clinicians to perform dozens more additional services via telehealth. As always, contact your provider first to see if your appointment can be conducted over the phone. If you develop emergency warning signs for COVID-19, get medical attention immediately.
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Here are additional key services Medicare has expanded due to the COVID-19 emergency:
- Lab tests for COVID-19. You pay no out-of-pocket costs.
- All medically necessary hospitalizations. This includes if you’re diagnosed with COVID-19 and need to stay in the hospital under quarantine instead of being discharged from the hospital after an inpatient stay.
Learn more about COVID-19 and your Medicare coverage on Medicare.gov.
I’m glad Medicare is covering the cost of COVID-19 lab tests. Since the tests are not available here in Currituck County, do you have any idea where the tests are conducted so that I can insure Medicare gets to pay my bill?
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Brother Thom, what are your thoughts regarding Medicare For All?
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Thanks for asking, Medicare for all would degrade the quality as well as the quantity of healthcare in America. There would be no competition for healthcare, so the need to be better and always improving wouldn’t be there anymore. Medicare for all wouldn’t help the uninsured. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine said, “Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements [compared to being uninsured] in measured physical health outcomes in the first two years.”
The wait time will be longer. After four weeks, 70 percent of Americans have seen a specialist, while only 40 percent of Canadians have. Emergency rooms will be flooded with patients who can’t or don’t want to wait to be seen. Canadians use ER’s like we use urgent care. Our private healthcare system would be eliminated under the plans put forward by Democrats. We would have no choice in healthcare even if we wanted it. Right now, people from all over the world fly and drive to the US for the best quality doctors, specialist,s, and surgeries. Where would we go after Medicare for all?
Medicare for all will put a government employee between you and your doctor. The government will decide what types of care are available and what is not. Aside from waiting in line for your turn to be seen for a non-life-threatening surgery, the government will decide what types of surgeries are available. Lastly Medicare for all has a 32 trillion dollar price tag.
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Brother Thom, private insurance companies essentially do the same thing.
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Private insurance companies are an open marketplace. We pick and choose the options we want in our coverage. We also have the ability to negotiate with our insurance providers often thru our physicians. Some procedures are denied only because the person writing the consult or the order wrote it wrong, or it was coded wrong. In many cases, our doctors have to provide greater detail to get orders approved. But, with Medicare for all, it is unlikely most of us will ever wade thru the even greater myriad levels of government to get the care we need. Canada is a good example of this.
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Brother Thom, this is true.
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