Strained analogy, but I got your attention: read article below.
Analysis: Don’t Want a Vaccine? Be Prepared to Pay More for Insurance.
Kaiser Health News. Elisabeth Rosenthal and Glenn Kramon
August 04, 2021
Anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers gathered at Indiana University to protest mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations the school is requiring for students, staff and faculty.
America’s covid-19 vaccination rate is around 60% for ages 12 and up. That’s not enough to reach so-called herd immunity, and in states like Missouri — where a number of counties have vaccination rates under 25% — hospitals are overwhelmed by serious outbreaks of the more contagious delta variant.
The vaccine resisters offer all kinds of reasons for refusing the free shots and for ignoring efforts to nudge them to get inoculated. Campaigns urging Americans to get vaccinated for their health, for their grandparents, for their neighbors, or to get free doughnuts or a free joint haven’t done the trick. States have even held lotteries with a chance to win millions or a college scholarship.
And yet there are still huge numbers of unvaccinated people. Federal, state and municipal governments as well as private businesses continue to largely avoid mandates for their employees out of fears they will provoke a backlash.
So, how about an economic argument? Get a covid shot to protect your wallet.
Getting hospitalized with covid in the United States typically generates huge bills. Those submitted by covid patients to the NPR-Kaiser Health News “Bill of the Month” project include a $17,000 bill for a brief hospital stay in Marietta, Georgia (reduced to about $4,000 for an uninsured patient under a “charity care” policy); a $104,000 bill for a 14-day hospitalization in Miami for an uninsured man; and a bill for possibly hundreds of thousands for a two-week hospital stay — some of it on a ventilator — for a foreign tourist in Hawaii whose travel health insurance contained a “pandemic exclusion.”
Even though insurance companies negotiate lower prices and cover much of the cost of care, an over $1,000 out-of-pocket bill for a deductible — plus more for copays and possibly some out-of-network care — should be a pretty scary incentive.
In 2020, before covid vaccines, most major private insurers waived patient payments — from coinsurance to deductibles — for covid treatment. But many if not most have allowed that policy to lapse. Aetna, for example, ended that policy Feb. 28; UnitedHealthcare began rolling back its waivers late last year and ended them by the end of March.
