The Senate voted unanimously on Wednesday to approve a sweeping, $2 trillion fiscal measure to shore up the United States economy as it weathers the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic, advancing the largest fiscal stimulus package in modern American history.
As Philadelphia officials scramble to expand the city’s hospital capacity in time to handle the expected surge of patients with the coronavirus, Mayor Jim Kenney accused the owner of the former Hahnemann University Hospital site on Tuesday of “trying to make a buck” out of the pandemic by seeking a high rent for his building.
CVS Health said it will waive co-payments and related out-of-pocket cost-sharing of commercially insured Aetna members’ inpatient admissions related to the Coronavirus strain COVID-19. The move is among the more significant thus far among health insurance companies that are expanding coverage and eliminating plan member cost-sharing for everything from doctor office visits for Coronavirus tests to telehealth consultations for screening of the disease.
Public health precautions undertaken to slow the spread of COVID-19, such as the cancellation of more lucrative elective surgeries, will hit rural hospitals especially hard, administrators say.
As the Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis unfolds, human and economic resources are and will be strained. Hospitals and health systems must be prepared to address the executive and physician compensation, benefits and contract issues that are very likely to follow.
President Trump is weighing calls from some Republican lawmakers and White House advisers to scale back steps to contain the coronavirus despite the advice of federal health officials as a growing number of conservatives argue the impact on the economy has become too severe, according to several people with knowledge of the internal deliberations.