As recounted by Business Insider, when Miami resident Osmel Martinez Azcue developed flu-like symptoms after a work trip to China, he did the responsible thing and got tested for both coronavirus and the flu. He had the flu, which still sucks but not as much. What sucked much more was the $3,270 hospital bill he got saddled with. Azcue’s “limited” insurance plan would chip in if he could produce three years of documents demonstrating that his flu wasn’t a pre-existing condition. If he supplied the proof, he would have to cough up $1,400, also known as “still a lot of money.” And that’s just one of the ways coronavirus treatment may harm Americans financially.

In February 2020, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar made the startling admission that if a coronavirus vaccine became available, it might not be affordable. Azar chalked up the problem to profitability, insisting, “We would want to ensure that we work to make it affordable, but we can’t control that price because we need the private sector to invest. Price controls won’t get us there.”

If you’re wondering why the United States doesn’t just insist on charging a reasonable price, the practice was abandoned back in the 1990s administration. Per the Intercept President Bill Clinton buckled under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry to eliminate a “reasonable pricing” rule, enabling drug companies to making a killing off of charging unreasonable fees for medicines.