Huge Debts, Depression And Hope – The Corona Aftermath Begins

From singers to partying men, the corona aftermath has come as a huge blow to patients and their families who have received massive credit card bills, which even the insurance companies are trying to dodge.

Huge Debts, Depression And Hope – The Corona Aftermath Begins

This article discusses two glaring cases where life and death seemed to be a long battle, but the financial debt has come in as a new battle for these people.  Not just the financial repercussions, but Corona has left many patients with long haul health disorders. Let us take examples one by one. 

Example 1 – Irene Schulz

Irene Schulz is a former Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease researcher whose job was to sing at the nearest home for the aged and disabled people. She lost her hearing due to Covid, had huge medical bills to pay and could not get back to work unless a new pair of hearing aids had to be bought. And did you know the whopping cost of these new aids? It was $5400, which was extra to the $10,000 medical bills she already had to pay. According to her, an additional $1500 is the cost of auxiliary medical expenses. “My job is to go out and sing and entertain these residents in the senior living facilities, and I need to be able to hear the frequencies, and I lost those during my infection with Covid. I have been suffering from severe depression because I can’t hear, and then I had this ringing in my ears; that is just, it’s deafening. I didn’t really want to wake up in the morning. I just, I was that depressed,” Her observations ring the truth of post-Covid trauma, ad financial distress. “It’s very scary when I can’t go to the doctors when I can’t afford it”, she said. “We need a healthcare system that actually works for us…we should not have to worry about whether we can afford to go to the doctor, or whether we’re going to be able to afford the procedure or the treatments or the drugs — we shouldn’t have to worry about this,” Schulz said. “I shouldn’t have to burden my family because Covid has left me the way it has.”

Her insurance company refused to pay 60% of the hearing aid cost and did not help with the Covid-19 health payments. 

Example 2 – Casey Gray 

Hospitalised for 75 days in Florida, half of which he was in a coma, the 29-year-old was ready to face a hefty bill at the time of discharge and had decided to do away with one car. He and his wife were calculating meagre amounts despite this big decision and guess what the bill came out to be? The bill was around $3.4 billion dollars. “We were kind of taking bets on how much we would actually have to pay, or like how much we would be billed for. I was like, I think it’s gonna be around a million dollars,” Gray said. His first bill was for a meagre $3.4 million dollars. “We looked at that price and we just kind of laughed. We were like yeah, it’s probably not going to happen,” he told CNN. What helped him pay? Hospital discounts brought the bill down to $900000; insurance left him and his family with $10,000 to be paid. Ultimately, GoFundMe crowdfunding got him 10  donors who could then help finish the payment. He is alive today but has to walk with a cane since his left foot is numb ever since he got back from coma. On the bright side, “There’s hope… it’s not all dark days, there is hope. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, there is,” he said.

According to Cheryl Fish-Parcham, the Director of Access Initiatives at Families USA that tracks private insurance payouts and cases, “People who have insurance that they either bought themselves or that they’re getting through an employer that is state-regulated. In that case, some states have required that those insurers waive cost-sharing for COVID-related treatment.”. So only those who are uninsured or under Medicaid are federally protected unless a new law is passed to cover Covid expenses and hospital bills.