Home COVID testing in Biden bungles – again

In one series belong to tweets this week, the Biden administration announced its latest plan to increase accessibility over-the-counter, at-home COVID-19 testing. Plans don’t make much sense.

To begin with, the government seems to think it makes sense to force insurance companies to reimburse Americans the cost of such tests, an approach that not only costs those companies money (making interest rates more likely to go higher) but also causes individual Americans to keep receipts and collect, Fill out and mail in forms in hopes of eventually receiving a check. It’s hardly the simplest or easiest approach to making sure people don’t have to bear the burden of paying for tests.

Why not simply make the tests available for free? There is a kind of pandemic precedent for how the Internal Revenue Service was directed to begin sending monthly payments to parents of children ages 6 to 17 after the US Rescue Plan, which includes the Tax Credit Children’s expansion, passed last March. Of course, it will be harder to deliver a physical product than it is to deposit money directly into a checking account. But the principle should be the same: If tests are important, the government should make them available as widely, quickly, easily and cheaply as possible.

That is why the administration, in a separate plan, President Biden announced in a speech three weeks ago, also buying 500 million tests “to distribute them for free to Americans who want them.” That sounds great, at least until you realize that in a country of 330 million people, that’s less than two checks per person. Then there’s the fact that, even though we’ve dived into the rise of Omicron, with the number of cases increasing and the number of deaths also beginning to rise, the site where people can claim The tests (to be mailed) aren’t even out yet. This sounds like too little, too late.

The supplement of the government plan providing 50 million free home tests to community health centers and rural clinics, like intentionally to set up more than 20,000 community-based free pharmaceutical testing sites, sounds promising, but is also quite complex and time-consuming. Will either start before the current variant runs in the right direction? If other variations follow Omicron, all of these could be useful. But it’s hard to see how much it can do to tackle the current wave.

It is understandable that Biden’s team initially assumed that a vaccine would cause a pandemic for us at this time. But between the rise of Delta variation during the summer and fall and now the rise of Omicron, that early summer optimism long outdated. The authorities apparently dropped the ball in the home test months ago and are now trying to catch up. It will have political consequences following this bad practice.