US COVID-19 funding inaction threatens fragile progress on racial, economic disparities: report

NEW YORK - Racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths are likely to worsen if the US Congress does not approve billions in new pandemic funding soon, major US news portal Politico has reported.

Due to a lack of support from Congress, the White House has no choice but to scale back or suspend programs that provide free testing, treatments and vaccinations, which will disproportionately affect the tens of millions of uninsured Americans, a majority of whom are people of color, said the report based on its interviews with public health experts, lawmakers and health officials.

In the early days of the pandemic, the federal government decided to make COVID-19 interventions available to everyone free of charge, which temporarily helped level the playing field in a nation where access to health care is usually tied to employment and income and often correlated with race.

However, the current congressional stalemate threatens to upend the fragile progress, according to the report.

"I'm concerned that we'll go back to the status quo, which we know carries with it great disparities and suffering," Democratic Representative Raul Ruiz from California, a leader of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and an emergency physician, was quoted as saying. "And the hardest-to-reach communities will be the first to suffer and the most to suffer from the lack of funds."

The Biden administration cautioned lawmakers in a meeting last week that without immediate new funding approved by Congress, the federal government will stop reimbursing doctors for testing, vaccinating and treating the uninsured.