bank card debt, ruined retirement plans

It took three months for Teresa Harding to open her termination letter.

“I could not take a look at it,” Harding, 47, said. For seven years, she’d worked at a pain management center in Lexington, Kentucky. “I enjoyed my co-workers and our patients.

“It was a fun, exciting job,” she added.

But after a serious bout with Covid in July 2021 that landed her within the hospital, Harding never got higher. Unable to work, she was laid off in January.

“I just sit at home, watching movies that I’ve seen before but don’t remember,” Harding said. “I’ve lost my purpose.”

She and her husband, Roy, also have to pay around an additional $300 a month for treatments for her lingering symptoms of memory loss, severe fatigue and migraines.

“We’re barely making ends meet,” Harding said.

On top of the toll taken on their health, patients with long Covid — a chronic illness with symptoms that persist for months or years after infection — describe a devastating impact on their funds.

Nearly half of individuals with long Covid reported increased medical expenses, in response to a recent survey conducted by the Patient Advocate Foundation. The nonprofit polled 64 individuals with the condition between 2020 and 2022. Greater than a 3rd of respondents said their income had gone down in consequence of long Covid.

“Long Covid is a primary example of a condition that can create big expenses since it has multiple symptoms, any of which could require distinct medications or treatments,” said Caitlin Donovan, a spokesperson for the National Patient Advocate Foundation, the PAF’s sister organization focused on educational resources.

“It also directly threatens patients’ ability to work consistently,” Donovan added.

As many as 23 million Americans are fighting the chronic condition, and “this number will only proceed to grow as Covid-19 continues to flow into,” in response to a recent report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The federal government agency warned that the illness may affect people’s financial stability, “resulting in an increased probability of eviction or homelessness.”

Although the Biden administration is researching long Covid and gathering task forces to deal with it, patients still describe difficulties navigating the prevailing safety net and the absence of any specific latest protections or aid to which they will turn. Earlier in the general public health crisis, the federal government expanded unemployment advantages and sent direct payments to households.

“Long Covid is as much a part of the pandemic as is the acute phase, during which the federal government went to great lengths to treat people and save lives,” said Oved Amitay, president of the Long Covid Alliance, an advocacy group. “We should always have the identical urgency and intentional effort to deal with this.”

Nearly three years after Sharon Sunders got Covid, she’s still coughing.

Within the spring of 2020, when months had passed since she’d first contracted the virus, Sunders tried to return to her job as a project manager at a marketing agency in Minneapolis.

Almost immediately, she realized she wasn’t up for it.

“There isn’t any way I could keep working,” said Sunders, 59. “My memory stinks.

“I’m short on breath after I talk or move around,” she added. “There’s severe exhaustion, too.”

Fortunately, Sunders had disability insurance through her job and has been capable of live off those payments. Nonetheless, they cover nearly half of her prior earnings.

“It’s enough to fulfill our basic needs, but not the rest,” she said.

Sunders had planned to work for at the least five more years to accumulate her nest egg. Those plans are actually foiled, and he or she and her husband, Joel, are considering starting to withdraw from their retirement savings years before they’d hoped.

“It’s had a reasonably dramatic effect on my retirement planning,” she said. “It’s scary.”

She’s also been hit with a slew of additional costs related to her condition.

“They’ve done MRIs of my heart and lungs; I have been to cardiologists and pulmonologists,” Sunders said. “I’ve had more tests than I can remember.”

One Harvard University researcher estimated that long Covid could leave patients with an additional $9,000 a 12 months in medical expenses.

The Biden administration announced in July 2021 that long Covid could possibly be considered a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, but patients and experts say it’s incredibly difficult for those with the condition, which may be tricky to diagnose, to get approved.

“Loads of individuals with long Covid are being denied Social Security disability insurance,” said Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, professor and chair of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine on the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Verduzco-Gutierrez works primarily with Covid patients through the clinic she established in 2020. She also spends quite a lot of her time on disability applications.

Of the long Covid patients she has seen, only 2 out of fifty who’ve applied for SSDI have been approved up to now, she said.

“They might not have the resources to undergo the method,” Verduzco-Gutierrez said. “They’re having to rent attorneys. A few of them are only giving up.”

Sunders is adamant that she qualifies for the profit, and refuses to present up. She’s currently involved in her third appeal of the federal government’s decision to reject her.

However the fight has worn her down much more.

“I normally have about a great hour a day,” she said. “It’s hard for me to answer all these requests for medical records.”

Thus far, the Social Security Administration has flagged about 44,000 disability claims nationally that include Covid as considered one of the medical conditions, in response to agency spokeswoman Nicole Tiggemann, making up just 1% of all disability applications the agency has received.

To be approved, “an individual should have a medical condition or combination of conditions that stops the person from working and is predicted to last at the least one 12 months or lead to death,” Tiggemann said.