Who Will Pay Ebola Patients' Medical Bills in the U.S.?

The arrival of Ebola in the United States this year led to an unprecedented medical response involving experimental drugs, round-the-clock care, and layers upon layers of protective gear. And none of it has been cheap.

Nine people have been treated for the virus in the U.S. since August. Seven recovered. The National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, which treated one of them, estimates treatment for patients diagnosed with Ebola costs $50,000 a day. Officials at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, which cared for two patients, put the daily cost at $30,000, and the total at $1.16 million for a single patient. Most patients have been hospitalized for more than two weeks.

The U.S. has shown it can beat Ebola. But who will pay for the expensive care it takes to do it?

It’s a tough question, and one that the people holding the bills seem reluctant to answer. Hospitals that have treated patients in Georgia, Nebraska, New York, and Texas did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the governors’ offices of these states. NIH was forthcoming about cost of care, but the feds pick up the tab for treatment there.

The topic of payment came up during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing earlier this month but only briefly. The Obama administration had requested $6.18 billion in emergency funding for Ebola response efforts in the U.S. Missing from the request, said Sen. Mike Johanns, was funding that would cover treatment of patients with Ebola on American soil. The federal government should cover the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s costs, he said, because it had asked the medical facility to take in patients.

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