Health insurers to start charging non-vaccinated for their hospital stays!

[thewayne]

How does a $20-50,000 bill sound for not getting vaccinated against a preventable disease?

Additionally, Delta Airlines is going to start charging their unvaccinated employees an additional $200 a month for health insurance. AND they lose their paycheck protection if they get sick with Covid!

So not getting vaccinated is going to start hitting people directly in their wallet!

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/covid-costs-billions-so-delta-to-charge-unvaxxed-airline-workers-200-month/


In other news, The Savior and Messiah for Many, Donald J. Trump, was booed at one of his rallies for recommending that the attendees get vaccinated, just like he and his wife did in January of this year. Looks like he's losing control of the beast that he's created.

He even got blowback from Alex Jones!
"Shame on you, Trump -- seriously...We like you, but my God, maybe you're not that bright. Maybe Trump's really a dumbass."
-- InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on the former president encouraging people to get the COVID-19 vaccine

Trump at Alabama rally:
"I recommend take the vaccines. I did it. It's good."
Largely-maskless crowd members:
"Boo!"
Trump:
"No, that's OK. That's all right...It is working. But you do have your freedom you have to keep. You have to maintain that."

Comments

[kathmandu]

It is somewhat surprising to see Trump ever out of tune with his followers. Maybe it's a case where he actually learned from experience and the rest of them, not having been in the hospital on life-support their own personal selves, have not learned yet.

[thewayne]

He was pretty darn sick when he was at Walter Reed, his doctors were afraid they were going to have to put him on a ventilator.  But the monoclonal antibodies came thru for him.  The problem is, there aren't enough MCAs to treat everybody, and it's a very expensive treatment.  For the rest of us it's best to get vaccinated and continue with masks and social distancing and hope that if you get sick, it's a mild case.  And if it's not a mild case, you get sick during an off-peak and your hospital isn't completely saturated.

[silveradept]

A fair few people online were making the argument that "you're responsible for your own costs if you're unvaccinated" is the nose of the camel for all sorts of other "we refuse to cover the cost of this because you didn't jump through these exact and conveniently impossible hoops before having an incident that requires critical care" things that would be weaponized against the people who need that critical care the most.

Seeing various Republicans trying to blunt the edge of the faction they've spent a long time inciting so they can be re-elected is both full of schadenfreude to watch them fail and infuriating about the very clear hypocrisy on board and the damage that the unleashed faction is going to do before they burn themselves out. Because people like Alex Jones aren't going to stop, because they make their money and influence from peddling the most inflammatory stuff, even when they don't believe a word of it personally.

[thewayne]

Absolutely valid point.  But if insurance companies do try to leverage this for other situations, it'll be even more ammunition for single-payer healthcare.

[silveradept]

Single payer healthcare is already wildly popular, at least according to the polls. Popular enough that any Congresscritter who isn't deeply in the pockets of the rich and the lobbyists would be promoting it as easy points of popularity toward getting themselves elected. That kind of thing might provide better support for it, but what I would like it to do is to finally piss off the people who can create such health care to the point where they're willing to risk all those campaign dollars. Or to create such a motivated population that it becomes a third rail for anyone to suggest privatizing health care ever again, or to be seen as sometime who doesn't care enough about the health of the country.

[motodraconis]

Good! Freedom is as freedom does. 😂