Surprise credit card charges hit New Yorkers from COVID-19 testing company

Maggie Muldoon had never heard of Medbar until she saw a $49 charge from the company show up on her credit card bill a couple of weeks ago. Upon searching her email spam folder, she found that she had a recent message from the company, which provides COVID-19 testing services. It informed her she had been billed for a test she got at Liberty Chemists in Flatbush — more than a year ago, in June 2021.

“I used to have to get tested for work all the time,” said Muldoon, a Sunset Park resident who works for a nonprofit. “I’ve been tested from random trucks on the side of the road and so many different places, and I’ve never had this happen.”

Muldoon is one of several New Yorkers calling out Medbar for randomly charging them for COVID-19 tests they thought would be covered by their insurance. The charges are appearing months after the fact. Gothamist spoke with four Brooklynites who shared receipts showing they received belated charges from the company.

Medbar has 17 one-star Google reviews, 15 of which describe similar experiences to Muldoon. In several cases, reviewers indicated that the company not only tried to bill them for costs that were allegedly not covered by their insurance — but also charged their bank accounts or credit cards directly without their authorization. “I had to cancel my debit card because they kept trying to charge me,” one reviewer wrote this month.

Medbar says it’s not doing anything illegal, though. The company said in a statement that patients signed an agreement when they got swabbed saying they would pay any fees not covered by their insurance — and had to enter their credit card information as a condition of getting tested.

Medbar, headquartered in the Trump Building in Manhattan’s Financial District, popped up in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a profile on the company from February 2021. Founder and CEO Eva Sadej told Pix 11 at the time that her other company, a mobile dental service called Floss Bar, was no longer viable when the pandemic hit. So, she pivoted to COVID-19 testing, and Medbar began offering the service at pop-up clinics, pharmacies and other sites.

The company accepts insurance. But it has recently been sending patients notices saying they agreed at the time they got tested to pay for any costs their insurance didn’t cover — fine print that those who spoke to Gothamist said they didn’t remember signing.

The federal CARES Act, signed into law in March 2020, aimed to ensure that COVID tests were free for patients by protecting them from copays or other forms of cost sharing. Those rules are still in place as long as the federal state of emergency around COVID-19 is ongoing.

But the legislation largely put the burden on the insurance carrier to cover the full cost of testing, said Sabrina Corlette, co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. If the insurance carrier fails to do so, she said, there aren’t any restrictions on providers “balance-billing” patients – billing a patient for the amount their insurance didn’t cover.

Before federal funding ran out, some testing companies…