Unvaccinated Covid patients cost the U.S. health system billions of dollars
kff.org
kff.org
As soon as you start excluding people from the health system because of lifestyle choices, you are deciding who should live and die.
Re: Cigarettes and seatbelts are bad analogies. Society (via the government) has made moves to reduce smoking and encourage seat belt wearing. Looks like the same is now happening for vaccinations with Biden’s new mandates.
Finally, the US healthcare system already decides who should live or die… either intentionally or structurally.
Get vaccinated.
1. https://www.timesofisrael.com/health-ministry-chief-says-cor...
2. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-vaccine-data-how-...
They have to do something because the vaccine just isn't stemming the tide!
Even at 100% vaccination rate there would still be issues, less issues, but far from Zero.
If you can prove vaccination status, of course, costs should still be covered for hospitalization, as you made the very little effort to derisk.
According to the CDC, obesity is a significant risk factor for COVID-19.
Edit- I am also familiar with wellness incentives/charges around smoking, obesity, and exercise.
https://khn.org/news/article/analysis-dont-want-a-vaccine-be...
https://khn.org/news/article/time-to-say-goodbye-to-some-ins...
https://taxfoundation.org/new-study-shows-smokers-and-obese-...
"According to the research, a person of normal weight costs on average £210,000 over their lifetime, a smoker just £165,000 and an obese person £187,000."
https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2020...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2...
why would you bother making such a silly comparison?
https://www.healthcare.gov/preventive-care-adults/
We do still unfortunately have about 8% uninsured but local health departments occasionally offer free vaccination clinics for them.
I am all for a reforming health care markets and getting third party payers out of the system. Until then ...
For what it’s worth folks, it’s not cheap, it’s not easy, but it is about choice and it will be a battle of will every day of someone’s life. Pretty sure I can speak from experience here— I have spent the last four years taking off 170lbs through diet and exercise.
But sure, let's just inject ourselves with experimental drugs instead of working out because it's easier. (it's not, you will die anyway)
Food is cheap, that's the problem, even healthy food is cheap, not the whole food shit, but the boring stuff.
Cook your own food, eat only once or twice until your stomach is small, you get used to it.
Getting a shot is not going to help any fat fuck fight covid.
But you are right, I don’t know what you are, but I can deduce a few things from your comments with enough certainty that given the opportunity to bet on it, I would. I am certain that you were never obese and never lost a significant amount of weight because you have zero perspective on how easy or hard it is just from the statement you made. Also, the term “fat fuck” you used also gives you away. You see, every fat person I know who has lost significant weight doesn’t make comments like that, because it’s pretty damned offensive. Like nearly n-word offensive to overweight people. See, we tend to be hyper sympathetic to people struggling to lose weight…because we know how truly hard it is—-both being obese and losing weight too.
Additionally, I suspect that you are probably pretty young (also because of the “fat fuck” comment). I suspect likely a teenager and certainly young enough that someone else buys and prepares the food you eat, probably a parent. No one who buys food 2021 would characterize healthy food as “cheap”. It ain’t.
Thank you for your opinion and advice, and I hope should you ever gain weight and need to lose it, I hope it works for you as easily as you claim it to me.
A better example, actually, is someone refusing free treatment for lung cancer at stage 1, because they believe that cancer isn't real and Big Onco is trying to kill them, and then barging into the hospital, and demanding treatment when they hit stage 3. I'd have very little sympathy for that person.
While we're at it: obesity, lung cancer, liver issues, diabetes, skin issues, addiction issues, some mental health issues, broken bones! - all to varying extents often/can be caused by certain choices.
Ban them all, only what, acts of God and (resp. including) genetics treated here?
(Just to perhaps head off some of the hate: I've nothing to do with the US health system, and am 'fully' vaccinated.)
You're exactly right that not being vaccinated is not unique in this regard. Which is an argument for more intervention. People should obviously be treated even if their illness is a consequence of choice, but this also implies we can have a say in what people do. Population health is always a collective matter, as this pandemic shows. We all share the same ecosystem.
Singapore spends 6% of its GDP on healthcare compared to 20% in the US. In Singapore the live expectancy is 83 years, the highest in the world. Some American states rank below mainland China, the nation ranks below Cuba.
Not to say that education, rehabilitation, etc. as appropriate doesn't have its place alongside treatment. And I'm by no means holding up US healthcare (or expenditure on it) as a model system.
(I'm commenting from the UK - in broadest possible terms, our political left thinks our NHS is great and the model system - just needs more spent on it; the right thinks the NHS is great and Singapore has the model system.)
If we legislated based on cost to healthcare we would have already gone after heart disease. Heart disease is mostly avoidable and it’s caused by choices we make over our lives.
Remember that the obesity epidemic started in the 80s. Before then, it's not like we don't lack access to all the food that we ever want to eat.
And then finally our choices. We could exercise choices to fix our problem, individually or collectively, but it's a difficult uphill struggle.
However, vaccination is different. It is not a struggle to walk into your pharamacy and get a flu or covid-19 vaccine. The only problem was the information environment that people are immersed in that dissuade people to take an otherwise very easy action to do.
> ... roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease ... this study suggests that COVID hospitalization tallies can’t be taken as a simple measure of the prevalence of severe or even moderate disease, because they might inflate the true numbers by a factor of two ... referring to decisions about school closures, business restrictions, mask requirements, and so on, “we should refine the definition of hospitalization. Those patients who are there with rather than from COVID don’t belong in the metric.”
People should need health passports to eat fast food or buy unhealthy foods. /s
Note that the Hadza people, one of the most active people in the world, burn about the same amount of calories as sedentary population in Europe and the US.
Anyway, I am speaking of this as a person who lost 32 lbs over the past four months without having to count a calories and who attempted to overcome basal metabolism adaptation by sheer high level of physical activities.
Unvaccinated people are simultaneously people with a right to care despite their bad choices, and people whose bad choices are harming them and those around them. No dissonance or hypocrisy required to believe both are true.
The hard part, acknowledging that, is reducing that harm.
And yes - I believe choosing not to be vaccinated against COVID is a bad or even immoral choice, depending on the reasons. I understand why someone would, but I don't support it, and I don't have to in order to think people who make that choice are still worth something as people.
Even as a member of a minority group, the notion that we'd deny healthcare to any group of people especially when there's a connotation of race (yes, even if the narrative is meant to be against uneducated poor white people) is fundamentally wrong.
The feigned empathy for the unvaccinated is down right appalling in this country. One day, we're cheering that white trump supporters are dying en-masse from covid. And now, the calls to continue draconian measures until an overwhelming percentage of people are vaccinated is basically criminal.
This is obviously going to be downvoted, but it's time to really think about what choices we make now could lead to in a not so distant future. If Australia is what 5 years into the future holds, I'm not too interested in remaining in this country.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/unvaccinated-covid...
Or, 0.0007 Afghanistan Wars.*
* For those who do the math, I'm including the interest.