Don't Want a Vaccine? Be Prepared to Pay More for Insurance.
Americas Covid-19 vaccination rate is at around 60 percent, for ages twelve and up. Thats not enough to reach so-called herd immunity, and in states like Missouri where a number of counties have vaccination rates under 25 percent 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 vaccinated. Campaigns urging Americans to get vaccinated for their health, for their grandparents, for their neighbors, to get free doughnuts or a free joint havent 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-19 shot to protect your wallet.
Getting hospitalized with Covid-19 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, GA (reduced to about $4,000 for an uninsured patient under a charity care policy); a $104,000 bill for a fourteen-day hospitalization in Miami for an uninsured man; 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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/02/opinion/health-insurance-unvaccinated.html
This will make the first time in the history of the United States where health insurance companies are the good guys.
SheltieLover
(57,073 posts)And be put at end of admission list so normal, thinking, functional vaxed folks can get necessary care.
Lettuce Be
(2,336 posts)you should certainly pay higher rates -- they charge more if you are a smoker after all.
Response to Lettuce Be (Reply #3)
Chin music This message was self-deleted by its author.
Make them pay.
PortTack
(32,606 posts)sinkingfeeling
(51,274 posts)imagine how much it costs spending WEEKS in ICU