As thousands of companies experience record losses and millions of Americans lose their jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic, the medical testing business–much like the health insurance business–is profiting wildly. Share prices for Quest Diagnostics and Laboratory Corporation of America, the two largest testing corporations in the US, are rising rapidly. Their profits come in tandem with nearly 5.5 million Americans who have fallen victim to the virus.
Experts agree that testing is key to containing the novel coronavirus. But, it only works when people can afford it and testing labs can provide timely results. Even with insurance, a test can cost hundreds of dollars. In some cases, it can take more than a week or two to get results, and the results become meaningless.
Most hospitals and insurance companies rely almost exclusively on Quest and the Laboratory Corporation of American for coronavirus testing. And, these labs are over capacity.Quest and Laboratory Corporation of America often cannot deliver quick test results for COVID-19. Testing does not deliver the benefits it should.
States have found other testing labs that can deliver fast test results. And, fortunately, the CARES Act requires health insurers to pay the full cost of out-of-network testing. But, out-of-network labs can require people to pay upfront and then get reimbursement from their insurers. And, health insurers are unable to control the price.
Meanwhile, Quest Diagnostics and the Laboratory Corporation of America are raking in money. Quest is projected to bring in $1 billion in 2020. The for-profit health care sector is flourishing.
Our for-profit health care system has birthed big lab corporations upon which most big insurers and hospitals rely exclusively for testing. These lab corporations can charge a lot for their COVID-19 services. And, they can take a long time to deliver results, knowing that, for the most part, they will not lose business to smaller labs that can deliver results quickly and at far lower cost.
On top of that, test results lose their benefits because the US has no single electronic health database. Test results cannot be coordinated. The value of testing is not nearly as great as it should be.
The highly fragmented for-profit US health care system is failing Americans. Small hospitals serving rural and low-income populations are closing, thousands of doctors are being laid off, and millions of Americans cannot get needed care.
Public health is unprofitable. And, because profits drive our health care system, public health accounts for only about 2.5 percent of health care spending. We lack a national public health infrastructure that works. The government has cut spending on public health extensively in the last dozen years. We have 55,000 fewer public health workers.
There is no good reason that the US has no coordinated means of monitoring the spread of the coronavirus in realtime.There’s no excuse for the fact that our testing system is so broken. It’s simply about our government’s and the for-profit health sector’s priorities. And, sadly, for Congress, supporting for-profit corporations continues to rank ahead of the public health and the well-being of Americans.
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