[ad_1]
The covid-19 vaccination rate in the United States is around 60% for ages 12 and older. That’s not enough to achieve so-called herd immunity, and in states like Missouri – where a number of counties have vaccination rates below 25% – hospitals are overwhelmed with severe outbreaks of the delta plus variant. contagious.
Vaccine resistant offer all kinds of reasons for refusing free vaccines and for ignoring efforts to get them to get vaccinated. Campaigns urging Americans to get vaccinated for their health, for their grandparents, for their neighbors, or to get free donuts, or a free joint have not done the trick. States have even run lotteries with a chance to win millions or a college scholarship.
And yet there are still a large number of unvaccinated people. Federal, state and municipal governments as well as private companies continue to largely avoid their employee mandates for fear they will provoke a backlash.
So how about an economic argument? Get vaccinated against Covid to protect your wallet.
Being hospitalized with Covid in the United States usually generates huge bills. Those submitted by Covid patients to NPR-Kaiser Health News’ Bill of the Month project include a bill of $ 17,000 for a brief hospital stay in Marietta, Georgia (reduced to about $ 4,000 for a patient not insured under a “charitable care” policy); a bill for $ 104,000 for a 14-day hospitalization in Miami for an uninsured male; and a bill from perhaps hundreds of thousands of people for a two-week hospital stay – some 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 a large portion of the cost of care, a bill of over $ 1,000 for a deductible – plus more for co-payments and perhaps some off-grid care – should be a pretty scary inducement.
In 2020, before the Covid vaccines, most large private insurers waived patient payments – from coinsurance to deductibles – for Covid treatment. But many, if not most, have dropped this policy. Aetna, for example, ended this policy on February 28; UnitedHealthcare began canceling its waivers at the end of last year and ended them at the end of March.
More than 97% of patients hospitalized last month were not vaccinated. While the vaccines don’t necessarily stop you from catching the coronavirus, they are very effective in ensuring that you will have a milder case and that you will not be hospitalized.
For this reason, there is logic behind the backsliding of insurers: why should patients be financially free from what is now preventable hospitalization, thanks to a vaccine the government paid for and made available for free? It can now be found in many pharmacies, it appears at highway rest areas and bus stops, and it can be delivered and administered at home in some parts of the country.
A tougher society could impose stiff penalties on people who refuse vaccinations and contract the virus. Recently, the National Football League ruled that teams will lose a canceled game due to a Covid outbreak among unvaccinated players – and none of the team players will be paid.
But insurers could try to do more, like penalizing the unvaccinated. And there is a precedent. Already, some policies do not cover treatments made necessary by what insurance companies consider risky behavior, such as scuba diving and rock climbing.
The Affordable Care Act allows insurers to charge smokers up to 50% more than non-smokers pay for certain health plans. Four-fifths of states follow this protocol, although most employer plans do not. In 49 states, people caught driving without auto insurance face fines, car forfeiture, loss of their license and even jail. And reckless drivers pay more for their insurance.
The logic behind the policies is that the behavior of offenders can hurt others and costs society a lot of money. If a person decides not to get the vaccine and contracts a bad case of Covid, they’re not just exposing others in their workplace or neighborhoods; the tens or hundreds of thousands spent on their care could mean higher premiums for others also in their insurance plans next year. Additionally, outbreaks in areas with low vaccination rates could help create more vaccine-resistant variants that affect everyone.
Yes, we often cover people whose habits may have contributed to their illness. Insurance regularly pays for drug and alcohol addiction detoxification and cancer treatment for smokers.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why insurers have so far also favored carrots over sticks to get people vaccinated. Some private insurers offer people who get vaccinated credit for their medical premiums, or gift cards and raffle prizes, according to America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry organization.
Hard love might be easier if the Food and Drug Administration gives the vaccines full approval, rather than the current emergency use clearance. Even so, taxpayer-funded plans like Medicaid and Medicare must treat everyone the same and would encounter a lengthy process to get federal waivers to experiment with incentives, according to Larry Levitt, executive vice president of KFF, an organization. nonprofit focused on health issues. (Kaiser Health News, where Rosenthal is editor, is a program under KFF.) These programs cannot charge different rates to different patients in a state.
KFF polls show that such incentives have limited value anyway. Many refractories say they will only be vaccinated if their employers ask them to.
But what if the financial cost of not getting the vaccine is just too high? If patients thought about the price they might have to pay for their own care, they might consider staying unprotected.
This article is republished from Kaiser Health News under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
[ad_2]
Source link