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So far this year, one in six Americans has received the updated COVID vaccine, and federal data shows that people with little or no health insurance are less likely to have that level of coverage against severe illness or death from COVID. .
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 16% of all U. S. adults had received the updated COVID vaccine as of Nov. 25. With the once-free pandemic tool now commercially available, stark differences emerged between the insured and the uninsured: About 18 percent of insured adults had received the last COVID vaccine, compared with about four percent of those without coverage, the CDC found. Other uninsured people under the age of 65 have the lowest levels of COVID vaccine coverage in the world. United States, according to a recent KFF poll.
To close this gap, the CDC introduced the Bridge Access Program in September, a billion-dollar effort to supply loose doses of COVID vaccine to uninsured and underinsured adults, an organization of others who have traditionally fallen through the cracks of national health care. system. .
There are no hospitals in Moultrie County, Illinois, a small rural network where about 15,000 more people live. It’s a situation where other people know each other,” said nurse Angela Hogan, who heads the county’s public fitness department. Residents have suffered from the COVID pandemic, he said, just like the rest of the country. Within a week, another 4 people were recently hospitalized with confirmed COVID cases, according to federal data, marking a recent improvement.
READ MORE: Rise in U.S. life expectancy is ‘good news,’ but gains aren’t enough to wipe out COVID losses
When she heard about the CDC’s new program to make updated COVID vaccines more flexible and accessible, she instructed her county to sign up, failing to do everything she could to “lessen the impact” of the virus on her network and save her further pandemic losses.
“We chose to do this because it provides more vaccine for everyone who needs it,” Hogan said. “People who need to get the vaccine will get it, but removing monetary barriers is a positive. “
The American fitness care formula is the most expensive in the world, but produces some of the lowest life expectancy rates in the evolved world. About 30 million Americans have little or no fitness insurance, making it difficult to get vaccinated in the country’s much-hyped fitness program. Physical care formula. When the COVID public health emergency ended in May 2023, the budget that had covered millions of vaccine doses and allowed communities to set up free clinics began to run out. In many ways, the country’s physical care formula has returned to its pre-pandemic problems.
Once private insurance companies and public insurance programs like Medicaid and Medicare started footing the bill for COVID vaccines, individuals found themselves caught in the middle. Insured Americans were not immune to the challenges, like setting up appointments at pharmacies but unsure if their dose would be covered. Some patients faced questions over reimbursements, receiving billing notifications that their once-free COVID vaccination could cost them hundreds of dollars.
“It shouldn’t be the case that your ability to pay for a vaccine governs what your ultimate outcome might be if you get COVID,” said Dr. Nirav Shah, the CDC’s principal deputy director who is overseeing the Bridge Access Program.
If all goes well with the Bridge Access Program, public health officials hope the program will expand beyond COVID to achieve broader access to vaccines for adults in underserved communities.
When federal regulators first authorized COVID vaccines for emergency use in December 2020, the U.S. government paid for all of those doses in an effort to pave the way for easy vaccinations and protect as many people as possible against the virus.
That changed in the fall of 2023, when COVID vaccines were marketed.
“The U. S. government is no longer guilty of buying or distributing those vaccines,” epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina told PBS NewsHour in October. “That means we now have multiple payers, i. e. , insurance companies, and adjustments to the delivery system, which unfortunately has resulted in slow deployment and a fragmented, inequitable and, frankly, system. “
For weeks, other people have reported disruption when receiving the updated COVID vaccine. Retail pharmacies cited delays in getting a dose or a sufficient number of doses. Scheduled appointments were canceled due to issues with vaccine sources, with little to no warning. Barriers arose in the logistics of everyday life, such as offering transportation or taking time off to get to a vaccination site.
Each sticking point created a barrier to access and affordability for many other people with insurance. It was even more insurmountable for those who didn’t have one. The most sensible thing about that is that getting vaccinated against COVID is a lower priority for many. others in the midst of a collective struggle to get back to life as it was before the pandemic.
Nationally, “there’s little demand” for the updated COVID vaccine, said Lori Tremmel Freeman, executive director of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, adding that the Bridge Access program is providing 6 million doses in total. As of Nov. 28, more than 550,000 doses have been administered under the program, the CDC told PBS NewsHour.
The program “was never intended to be the overarching solution, but it was meant to bridge the gap,” Freeman said. “It’s rather distressing that even with that low number of vaccine doses available, we still don’t have the uptake that we want.”
Across the country, the Bridge Access program has been implemented through a network of retail pharmacies, such as CVS and Walgreens, network fitness clinics, and local and state fitness departments. In Moultrie County, according to Hogan, about 150 more people have earned their updated COVID vaccine since November.
Hogan said the onus is on the health provider to determine if a patient has insurance that would cover the vaccine’s cost, a process that has been “very seamless and very easy” for patients who only need to show up, she said.
During Medicaid’s historic denouement after the end of the public health emergency in 2023, approximately 12 million people were excluded from their public insurance. Many of them only find out about this prestige update when they need medical attention or go to a doctor. or an appointment to get vaccinated, said Dr. Kyu Rhee, executive director of the National Association of Community Health Centers.
According to Rhee, a quarter of all doses in the program went to network fitness centers at approximately 1,500 sites across the United States. These centers treat more than 31 million patients, and of those patients, one in five are uninsured and six in ten are covered through Medicaid.
Millions of Americans trust and depend on network fitness centers to help them get out of a fragmented physical care system, especially when they are uninsured or have recently unsubscribed, Rhee said.
“Many of those folks are working poor, and many of those are in communities that need it the most,” he said.
Public health advocates say they expect to see more uptake of the Bridge Access Program and the updated COVID vaccine overall as the nation moves deeper into winter. It is not too late to get vaccinated against COVID, influenza or RSV, Shah said. While he acknowledged that “we’re all tired of COVID” and said that the “worst of COVID is likely in the rearview mirror,” Shah added, “COVID will be with us for the long-term.”
Based on the hundreds of millions of COVID vaccine doses that have been administered since late 2020 in the U. S. alone, COVID vaccine doses have been administered in the U. S. alone. “What we’ve noticed from the data is that the vaccine is effective,” Shah said. “Fortunately, the idea that the vaccine has long-term considerations or consequences has not been detected in the knowledge. “
The updated COVID vaccine “is pretty well adapted to the viruses circulating around us,” Shah said. While the Bridge Access program lately is only a small fraction of the doses administered so far in Moultrie County, Illinois, Hogan said he expects an increase in demand if “we see an increase in the COVID virus. “
The program is set to expire at the end of December 2024, and Shah said it represents a forward-looking roadmap for how to deliver life-saving vaccines to adult populations who aren’t well-insured enough and might be more willing to tinker with exposure to a vaccine-friendly disease that can only be avoided with limited finances.
“I hope we recognize that we want people to stay healthy — we don’t want them to go to schools or workplaces sick,” Rhee said. “To me, there should be a vaccine-for-adults program.”
Rhee pointed to the decadeslong success of the federally funded Vaccines for Children program, which the CDC estimates to have saved trillions of dollars and prevented hundreds of millions of cases of pediatric illness. A program modeled after it for adults would go far to ease patient concerns about cost while preserving health at individual, household and community levels, he said.
But the country has “a long way to go” when it comes to shots of the updated COVID vaccine, Freeman said. Of all the respiratory illnesses circulating in the United States lately, COVID-19 remains the leading cause of hospitalizations and deaths. , and the fourth leading cause of death overall. ” It’s disappointing after everything we’ve been through and the effect it’s had on other people in their lives and the lives of their families. We deserve to know more about how to do it now. We have a tool that has been proven to protect.
Laura Santhanam is the Health Reporter and Coordinating Producer for Polling for the PBS NewsHour, where she has also worked as the Data Producer. Follow @LauraSanthanam
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