#coronavirus testing

Arthur Delaney at HuffPost:

Former President Donald Trump kept in touch with Russian President Vladimir Putin after Trump left office, according to “War,” a new book by famed reporter Bob Woodward. An aide to Trump told Woodward he was once asked to leave a room at Trump’s home in Florida so he could have a private phone call with Putin. “According to Trump’s aide, there have been multiple phone calls between Trump and Putin, maybe as many as seven in the period since Trump left the White House in 2021,” Woodward wrote, according to CNN, which obtained a copy of the book ahead of its release later this month.

Trump has spoken fondly of Putin over the years; he used the words “genius” and “savvy” to describe Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, for instance. Trump claimed to have been the victim of a “witch hunt” when the Justice Department investigated his 2016 campaign’s contacts with Russian sources. Woodward reported in “War” that Avril Haines, President Joe Biden’s Director of National Intelligence, said she didn’t know whether Trump and Putin have spoken. “I wouldn’t purport to speak to what President Trump may or may not have done,” Haines said, according to Woodward.

[...] Another revelation in Woodward’s new title is that Trump sent Putin a secret shipment of COVID-19 testing equipment in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, when tests could sometimes be hard to come by. Putin reportedly begged Trump not to tell. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me,” Putin said, according to Woodward. “They don’t care about me.”

Bob Woodward’s soon-to-be released book War revealed that Donald Trump had multiple phone calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin since leaving office and that he sent Russia a shipment of COVID-19 testing equipment while ignoring our nation during a time of crisis when COVID was ravaging the entire world in 2020.

See Also:

propublica: A global pandemic ravaging America is no time to forget the first rule of American health care: There is no set price. This is one family's story of how a $175 drive-thru coronavirus test resulted in a $2,479 bill.

What makes this possible? The CARES Act, passed by Congress in March, includes a provision that says insurers must pay for an out-of-network COVID-19 test at the price the testing facility lists on its website. But it sets no maximum for the cost of the tests. Insurance representatives told ProPublica that the charge for a COVID-19 test in Texas can range from less than $100 to thousands of dollars.

Some public heath experts say there should be a nationally mandated price and government subsidies to make sure medical providers and manufacturers are motivated financially to provide tests.

“Testing should be free,” said Stuart Craig, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies health care costs. “In fact, we should probably be paying patients to get tested.”

"We really couldn't understand why we weren't able to have our identities verified, " says Laura McCormack about the moment she and her partner, who both had the three main symptoms of coronavirus, were refused a home test kit.

They had logged on to the government website to request one, but were told that because their names and addresses could not be checked, they would have to go to a physical test site instead.

With no car and needing to avoid public transport because of their symptoms, it took them five days to get a test site close enough to walk to - one that was 90 minutes away...

Because Laura has been in the UK less than a year, she has not built up much of a credit history.

"In the end, it became clear that people with no credit history were having very similar problems. People who haven't taken out loans or don't have phone contracts or credit cards here in the UK," she says...

The Department for Health and Social Care, which is running the test system across the UK, says it uses a credit reference agency, TransUnion, to verify people's identities to "reduce fraud and prevent multiple testing kits being ordered, diverting capacity from where it is needed most".

TransUnion told Money Box in "some cases we may not be able to verify the individual's identity - which can happen for a number of reasons". It refused to explain what those reasons are.

While Laura doesn't have much of a credit history, she is on the electoral roll and does have a bank account and utility bills in her name...

Anna Miller, from charity Doctors of the World, questioned whether identity verification for home test kits is creating the solution to a problem that doesn't exist - at the expense of people like Laura.

"The types of people affected are anybody who has little to no credit history or credit footprint," she says.

"People whose financial situations tend to be organised by other people in a family and women, like elderly people, are likely to be more disproportionally affected.

And new cases are the highest they have been since May. And schools are going back.

WH Press Sec. Kayleigh McEnany tried to defend Pres. Trump’s call for slowing coronavirus testing as a ‘joke’ on the media