By Kara Manke, June 24, 2020, UC Berkeley Public Health.
This article originally appeared on the Berkeley News website.
The COVID-19 pandemic has cost California’s public and private insurers an estimated $2.4 billion dollars in testing and treatment — about six times the annual cost to treat seasonal influenza in the state, according to a new study by researchers at the Nicholas C. Petris Center at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health.
In the absence of a vaccine, this number could grow to $25.1 billion before enough of the population becomes infected to achieve herd immunity, the study found. The $25.1 billion estimate represents about 6% of the total annual health care spending in California.
The majority of the costs — about 59% — are born by commercial insurers who could pass the sudden expenditure onto consumers in the form of price hikes on health insurance premiums. The rest of the costs are split among the federally-run Medicare program, the state-run Medi-Cal program and uninsured individuals.
“These are unexpected costs to the health care system in California,” said Richard Scheffler, Professor of the Graduate School at UC Berkeley and leader of the research team. “With the budget crisis we’re having, and all the disruption in health care, we now have additional costs that the state has to pay through its Medi-Cal program.”
“Just in the last two months, we’ve recognized a whole slew of chronic diseases that infection with SARS-CoV-2 is causing, including multi-system inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C) that children are getting and heart damage from COVID,” said John Swartzberg, a clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at UC Berkeley. “And the list just keeps growing. In two months, we’ve recognized at least five new diseases caused by COVID(-19). And who knows how many more we’re going to see in the next several months to a year or more?”
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