Make Vaccine Refusers Pay More for Insurance

As noted in numerous posts, I have zero sympathy for Covid vaccine refusers save those with legitimate and documented medical conditions that make vaccination dangerous.  There should be no exemptions from vaccination based on political or religious beliefs and I fully support employers making vaccination a requirement for continued employment,  Any employee who fails to get vaccinated (except those with legitimate medical excuses) should be terminated for cause and barred from receiving unemployment benefits.  A national pandemic requires forceful action and those who endanger others should be barred from restaurants, public buildings, and public accommodations if they cannot produce proof of vaccination.  Now, health insurance carriers may be about to make vaccine refusal even more costly: make vaccine refusers pay more - ideally significantly more - for health insurance coverage or, better yet, deny them coverage completely (non-profit hospitals should also be allowed to turn them away).  There needs to be a real and significant cost imposed on those who deliberately endanger others and put the nation's economy at risk. A column in the New York Times looks at what would be welcomed insurance carrier action.  Here are excerpts:

America’s Covid-19 vaccination rate is about 60 percent, 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 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 haven’t done the trick.

[T]here 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. . . . a more than $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 there were Covid-19 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. . . . . More than 97 percent of hospitalized patients last month were unvaccinated. Though the vaccines will not necessarily prevent you from catching the coronavirus, they are highly effective at ensuring you will have a milder case and are kept out of the hospital.

For this reason, there’s logic behind insurers’ waiver rollback: Why should patients be kept financially unharmed from what is now a preventable hospitalization, thanks to a vaccine that the government paid for and made available for free?

The Affordable Care Act allows insurers to charge smokers up to 50 percent more than what nonsmokers pay for some types of health plans. Four-fifths of states follow that protocol . . . . In 49 states, people who are caught driving without auto insurance face fines, confiscation of their car, loss of their license and even jail. And reckless drivers pay more for insurance.

The logic behind the policies is that the offenders’ behavior can hurt others and costs society a lot of money. If people decide not to get vaccinated and contract bad cases of Covid, they are not only exposing others in their workplace or neighborhoods; the tens or hundreds of thousands spent on their care could mean higher premiums for others as well in their insurance plans next year.

Many holdouts say they will be vaccinated only if required to do so by their employers. . . . But what if the financial cost of not getting vaccinated were just too high? If patients thought about the price they might need to pay for their own care, maybe they would reconsider remaining unprotected.