Jen Psaki Takes Another Crack at Free Home Covid Test Question: We Don’t Want to Have ‘Millions Of Tests Go Unused’
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was grilled a second time about why she dismissed the idea of sending free Covid tests to every American household.
At Tuesday’s briefing, USA Today White House correspondent Joey Garrison revisited a contentious exchange between Psaki and NPR’s Mara Liasson from the day before.
” Yesterday, you seemed to dismiss the idea of sending COVID-19 tests to all Americans, but other countries have taken similar aggressive steps to make free test — testing free, available to all citizens,” Garrison said.
He gave a few examples, and asked “why the administration doesn’t think that sending tests — COVID-19 tests to all Americans is a good strategy?”
Psaki delivered a lengthy response in which she listed six or seven ways in which the administration has made free testing available to Americans, including by requiring insurance companies to reimburse them for at-home tests.
Garrison acknowledged those efforts — then asked “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to just send them to all American homes?”
Psaki replied that the administration believes its efforts are the best way to make testing available, and again pointed out they include “a component where people can have tests for free at their home. ”
“But we — our approach is not to send everyone in the country a test just to send — to have millions of tests go unused where we know others can make use of them,” Psaki said.
Garrison took one more shot at the question, noting “you did seem to reference cost yesterday,” and asked “is that a concern with just how — logistically, financially — how hard that would be to get to all American households?”
Psaki reiterated that “we have made the assessment that doing that is most effective by making them — by donating these 50 million tests to community health centers and rural health centers, by making them available at 20,000 pharmacies, by working with schools and workplaces to make testing available, and also to have — providing the option for people to get free tests in their homes.”
Watch above via C-Span.
