MassMutual
to Give $3 Billion in Life Insurance to Health Care Workers
Zurich North America and Prudential PLC also have announcements
for the COVID-19 age.
Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company is
starting a $3 billion life insurance aid program for health care workers in
Massachusetts and Connecticut.
The new MassMutual HealthBridge program will
provide up to $25,000 in free, three-year term life insurance coverage for
active employees of licensed hospitals, urgent care centers, or emergency
medical services providers with jobs that involve occupational exposure to
severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that
causes COVID-19.
Health care workers can apply for the coverage
by filling out an application in the program website and uploading proof of
employment.
The program is an extension of MassMutual’s
LifeBridge program, which provides term life insurance for low-income parents.
MassMutual plans to begin taking applications
for the program by the end of April.
More information is available here.
In other COVID-19-related announcements:
RIP Medical Debt has started a fund that will buy back
and cancel the pre-existing medical debt owed by nurses,
home health aides, pharmacists, social workers and others who are fighting
COVID-19.
The New York-based nonprofit will use
contributions to the fund to identify, buy and abolish the debts.
More information about the fund is available here.
GoodRx has set up an online telehealth services catalog.
People who are sheltering in place at home can
use the exchange to shop for telehealth services, such as help with conditions
such as flu or the acne, from many providers.
The menu of providers includes MDLive,
HealthTap and Teladoc.
The telehealth services catalog is available here.
Zurich North America has developed a product that employers
can use to provide cash benefits for eligible employees who are
hospitalized for more than five consecutive days with COVID-19.
Any profits from the product will go to hunger
relief charities, the insurer says.
Zurich has structured the products as a
surplus lines policy. It’s offering the product to employers with 5,000 or more
eligible employees in most industries.
The policy can pay an eligible insured worker
up to $4,000 in benefits, on top of what the worker might get from the
employer’s health plan, the employer’s disability plan, and any hospital
indemnity insurance policies.
The employer will act as the
policyholder, pay the cash benefits to the eligible employees, and then submit
claims to Zurich for reimbursement, the company says.
The company says interested employers should
talk to their insurance brokers or to their Zurich representatives.
An arm of Prudential PLC —
the London-based parent of Jackson — is working with other organizations
to support Project Screen by Circle, a large-scale SARS-CoV-2 testing
program in Hong Kong.
The program will use screening test services
from Prenetics, a genetic testing company in Hong Kong, to provide SARS-CoV-2
testing for about 100,000 people in Hong Kong, at the patients’ homes.
The tests will cost the equivalent of about
$127 each, and Prudential will pay a subsidy of about $39 each for 30,000
health care workers, program organizers say.
The Prudential subsidy will cut the cost of
testing to about $88 for health care workers.
The program should be able to process tests
for about 3,000 per day, organizers say.
The program will also pay Stephen Tsui, a
researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, to work with Prenetics to
come up with complete sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 genome.
Allison Bell, ThinkAdvisor's insurance editor, previously was LifeHealthPro's health
insurance editor. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington
University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill
School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached at
abell@alm.com or on Twitter at @Think_Allison.
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