(Spirit Lake)– Dickinson County Public Health and Lakes Regional Family Medicine say they’ll begin billing insurance companies for administering the COVID-19 vaccine beginning June 1st. Lakes Regional Healthcare Director of Population and Public Health Katy Burke says this was always an option but they chose prior to this not to bill for vaccine administration considering the county was responding to a pandemic…
“So billing to insurance for the covid vaccine has been something that occurred in many locations and what prompted that change for us is that Lakes Regional Family Medicine, our clinic here at Lakes Regional Healthcare, is going to be offering it as well in their regularly scheduled office visits, so that’s something available to you if you just, you know, hey, I’m here why not get the vaccine? That’s going to be available and we will continue to offer the vaccine in our clinic on clinic days. So it seemed like a very good time to begin billing to insurance. Now it is very important that we reiterate that this continues to be completely free to all patients regardless of whether they have insurance or not. So even if you do not have insurance it will be completely free for you and only insurance companies will be charged this administration fee.”
Burke also gave us an update on vaccination numbers in Dickinson county…
“For our office, we’ve given over 8,600 doses, and looking at the state’s data, we have over 7,500 people actually vaccinated in Dickinson county. So that gets our numbers looking at the population to 43.8 percent, so we’re climbing closer to about half. You know, we’re getting there. 43.8 percent.”
Burke adds that beginning June 1st, Dickinson County Public Health will also be offering the Pfizer vaccine, in addition to Moderna…
“This is the very first time that we’ve been given the opportunity to have Pfizer through Public Health. And since Pfizer is offered to 12 and up, this is an additional way to create another access point for a larger part of our population to get vaccinated.”
Burke adds they do have some additional vaccination clinics coming up…
“On Tuesdays and Wednesdays we will be having covid vaccine available, and then on June 2nd we will have a special Pfizer only clinic from 1:30 pm until 4:00 pm, so that’s anybody that’s 12 and older interested in getting the vaccine. And so you can go to the Lakes Health-dot-org website and we’ll have a Sign Up Genius there for you to self-scheduled and get ready to go for next week. If you have any questions you can certainly call our office at 712-339-6050.”
The clinics will be held at the Dickinson County Public Health Office at Lakes Regional Healthcare.
