A new coronaviruses disease COVID 19 at-home test kit made by Lucira Health, newly approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization, sits on a table at Sutter Health lab in San Carlos, California, U.S. November 18, 2020. WASHINGTON, December 2, Reuters - Private health insurance companies will have to reimburse customers for the cost of over-the- counter at-home COVID 19 tests under new measures to combat the epidemic that President Joe Biden will unveil on Thursday, administration officials said.
A senior administration official told reporters ahead of Biden's announcement that the rule on reimbursement will benefit some 150 million Americans who have private health insurance.
The White House said that the health and human services department, Labor Department and Treasury Department, along with the Health and Human Services Department, will issue guidance on the issue by January 15.
The rule will not apply retroactively and will not apply to people on public health insurance plans, the official said. The administration is going to distribute 50 million tests to rural clinics and testing sites to help cover those who don't have private insurance and those who don't have insurance at all.
Biden plans to visit the National Institutes of Health NIH on Thursday and outline his administration's strategy to fight the pandemic over the winter by boosting efforts to encourage Americans to get COVID 19 vaccines and boosters, including steps to expand availability at pharmacies.
The country and world are facing new threats from the COVID 19 Omicron variant, which is one of the efforts to expand testing. Fears about the variant have pounded financial markets and created doubts about the speed of the global economic recovery as the pandemic continues.
More than 775,000 people have died from COVID 19 in the United States alone, with vaccine hesitancy among a large part of the U.S. population thwarting Biden's attempts to halt the spread of the disease.
The White House's winter plan also touches on travel.
Biden wants employers to require employees to be vaccinated or tested regularly despite legal setbacks to his efforts to force them to do so.
The president wants businesses to move forward quickly with requiring their workers to get vaccinated or tested weekly. The White House said this was especially important because of the Omicron variant.
In early November a federal appeals court temporarily blockaded Biden's workplace vaccine-or- testing mandate for businesses with at least 100 employees.