Free At-Home COVID Tests on Way for Medicare Beneficiaries

Beneficiaries in both original Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans will be eligible to receive at-home COVID-19 tests for free beginning in early spring. “This new initiative will enable payment from Medicare directly to participating pharmacies and other participating entities to allow Medicare beneficiaries to pick up tests at no cost,” the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced in a press release.

Medicare beneficiaries will be able to get 8 free over-the-counter COVID-19 tests at eligible pharmacies. The effort will get underway because the CMS was able to resolve a “number of issues” that made it difficult for CMS to launch such a program up until now.

“However, given the importance of expanding access to testing, CMS has identified a pathway that will expand access to free over-the-counter testing for Medicare beneficiaries,” CMS said in the press release. “This new initiative will enable payment from Medicare directly to participating pharmacies and other participating entities to allow Medicare beneficiaries to pick up tests at no cost.”

Kevin Kavanagh, MD, a member of Infection Control Today®’s Editorial Advisory Board, said that while he’s happy about CMS’ plan, he also added that “when the problem was detected, most had a hard time believing it even existed. Why would Medicare not pay for home tests when private insurance did, and the elderly were the highest risk for COVID? This rule change will help with future variants, but the Omicron surge will likely have subsided before a Medicare recipient can obtain a free home test kit at a pharmacy.”

In the meantime, Medicare beneficiaries can order 4 free at-home tests by going to covidtests.gov. They can also get tested at over 20,000 free testing sites nationwide. PCR tests can be given to Medicare beneficiaries for free if they are ordered by a doctor, a non-physician practitioner, a pharmacist or “other authorized health care personnel at no cost,” according to the press release.