As Prepared for Delivery
Thank you, Mr. President, for your continued leadership as we battle the coronavirus.
First, I want to thank all of the members of the HHS team and the frontline healthcare workers across America, including those service workers who serve in our hospitals and our healthcare facilities, those who clean, those who deliver, those who stock the shelves—all those who are going into battle every day against the virus.
Your country has asked you to serve as never before, and you have responded heroically.
I’m going to provide a brief update on the administration’s plans to cover testing and treatment for the uninsured.
Getting the uninsured access to the care they need is a top priority for President Trump.
We are already rolling out $1 billion in funding from the Families First Coronavirus Response Act to cover providers’ expenses for testing and diagnosing the uninsured.
The CARES Act signed by the President includes another $100 billion for healthcare providers.
Under the President’s direction, we will use a portion of that funding to cover providers’ costs of delivering COVID-19 care for the uninsured, sending the money to providers through the same mechanism used for testing.
As a condition of receiving funds under this program, providers will be forbidden from balance billing the uninsured for the cost of their care. Providers will be reimbursed at Medicare rates.
We will soon have more specifics on how the rest of the $100 billion will go to providers.
We are working to ensure that this funding is distributed in a way that is fast, fair, simple, and transparent.
I’d also like to remind people that, if you’ve lost employer insurance coverage, you have insurance options that you should look into.
You’d be eligible for a special enrollment period on the healthcare exchanges, and, depending on your state, you may be eligible for Medicaid.
Just as President Trump is working to ensure that COVID-19 treatment is paid for, he is working to support new treatment options for patients.
Thanks to the President’s leadership, many providers are trying different experimental therapies. We need as much as data as we can collect, as quickly as possible, on how these treatments are working.
Today, Oracle has developed and is donating to the government and the American people a web portal and platform to gather crowd-sourced, real-time information from providers about how patients respond to potential therapeutics.
While this doesn’t replace the important work of clinical trials, it gives us data rapidly.
If you are a doctor or a healthcare provider and would like to help us, you can sign up today to begin reporting on your work. There is a special registration page for providers at covid19.oracle.com.
Thank you very much.
