Most Americans might not be at risk of losing their job if they don’t get vaccinated against Covid, but some could soon be charged a health insurance ‘surcharge’ of up to $50 a month for not taking the ‘jab’, under new plans being considered by U.S. employers. MailOnline has the story.
Wade Symons, an Employee Benefits Attorney and Partner at the New York-based consulting firm Mercer, wrote in a blog post on Thursday that a number of employers are exploring the option.
“The rationale for adding a surcharge to health insurance contributions for unvaccinated employees is seen as similar to that for a tobacco-use surcharge,” Symons wrote.
“If an employee is unvaccinated and contracts a Covid infection, that creates higher claims costs, which can impact the employer’s bottom line, and mean higher future contributions for other employees,” he added.
Mercer is not revealing the names of the companies that are exploring the surcharge option, but Symons told Forbes that [the] amount of the surcharge being discussed with these employers is similar to the $20 to $50 a month charges companies already charge workers who smoke cigarettes.
The possibility of higher insurance premiums for the unvaccinated was also recently explored in a New York Times guest essay that noted: “Getting hospitalised with Covid in the United States typically generates huge bills.”
While most insurers waived patient payments such as copays and deductibles for Covid hospitalisations last year, now that vaccines are available, many are rolling back that policy, reasoning that hospitalisations are largely preventable. …
“The surcharge approach is intended to cause employees to change behavior voluntarily,” [Symons] wrote. “Employers are looking for options, but with labor shortages, vaccine mandates may remain a bridge too far.”
Although plans for insurance surcharges are still under consideration, other financial incentives have already been implemented by employers, including paid time off for those who get the vaccine.
Other employers are taking a firmer line, with Google and Facebook announcing that vaccines will be mandatory for all employees.
Worth reading in full.
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Good. safer behaviour is proportionately rewarded while riskier behaviour is proportionately penalised. quite right too. That’s how things should be.
Rather begs the question why governments have consistently failed to meaningfully back marriage (or tax rock climbing).
Still amounts to coercion to take an experimental medication that is not risk free though (see the CDC study in yesterday’s news roundup), and therefore is morally (and possibly legally) criminal. Will they also pay damages if the employees have a serious adverse reaction?
And can they employees get a rebate if they take vitamin D?
Taking experimental ‘vaccines’ is unsafe.
If anyone should be surcharged then those who do that..
Absolutely this.
The irony is that if someone were to try any other unapproved, experimental drug then I guess their medical insurance might be voided perhaps?
I don’t know for sure as I’m not familiar with US health insurance, but it seems likely.
And it’s not as if the “vaccinated” don’t get infected.
See Israel, Iceland etc.
Exactly.
Yep.
And you can make (much more valid) surcharge cases for tobacco, alcohol, drugs, sugar, fat, motor biking, skiing, even cycling and many more/practically everything, but obviously, bar tobacco, they aren’t made-yet.
It is nice to have a firm statement.
Presumably, if it emerges in time that the vaccines increase the risk of hospitalisation, either through enhanced disease or risk of vaccine complication, you would be in favour of the unvaccinated at that point having a discount on their health insurance?
I’d also imagine that you are not in favour of vaccine passports, given the information we now have on the loss of vaccine efficacy after only several months.
You are not fighting a losing battle, since vaccine documentation is already a fact. I printed out my own from the website.
We may still avoid general use of domestic vaxports, and I hope that parliament will do the right thing and vote against this in September. There is no positive discrimination, just discrimination.
P.S. do keep posting, it’s good to have all points of view.
The government’s guidance on domestic vaxports. Basically, if someone says to a venue/event they don’t need or have one, then the guidance is let them in.
I have printed the page off and will carry it as my ‘vaxport’.
https://www.nhsx.nhs.uk/covid-19-response/using-the-nhs-covid-pass/#exemptions
So is, self certified, exemption from vaccine documentation, in a domestic setting, I printed out my own from the website.
This is a self exemption from having to show the vp, sofar, so good indeed.
But the real question is what happens when the digital solution is available?
Will the vp then become mandatory to have and show (almost) everywhere, can we still self exempt-from the vaccination then, not from having to show the vp- digitally?!
Will we then also have the same rights as a vaxxed when going and being abroad, at least in countries with whom there is vp reciprocity?!
You’re writing random gibberish.
He’s very old.
fool
That depends on actuarial investigations.
f ool
Ever heard of an idea called consent? Letting people decide for themselves whether to undertake a “safer” or “riskier” behaviour and experience the natural consequences of their own choices? That’s a good lesson to learn you know, natural consequences, for covid vaccines they are as such: don’t have it and maybe you get covid and maybe you get a bad case, have it and maybe you get side effects, you also can still get covid but your chance of a bad case is less. Do as you will with your vaccine status, but respect othere folks privacy, or would you prefer to live like a uighur under communist occupation?
As one comedian had it, “do you have herpes?”
As I say, coercion rates increase…
Obesity is the number 1 cause of Covid morbidity and mortality, yet I see no move to penalize people who are overweight. Oops, I think that kind of thing was viewed as being discriminatory. I also don’t recall people ever being penalized because they didn’t follow their doctor’s treatment plan. I think that was called bodily autonomy.
Anxiety is the second. “Vaccine” apartheid is bound to cause a lot of that.
In any case, it’s all a lot of nonsense for a bug that is demonstrably within the range of a severe flu season and endemic (or soon will be), that is the bottom line.
Oh dear, My noble lord, you have lost the leverage of infection and transmission, so now you are clutching at this straw. Not only is the vaccine narrative unraveling, but you are going to be sweating on the potential of vaccine failure or, God forbid, ADE, as the evenings draw in… never mind, keep up your vitamin D intake!!!
And yet the rate of hospitalised vaccinated now outstrips the unvaccinated. So who’s the safer? The vaccine does NOT stop infection, illness or transmission. It’s the vaccine that’s the risk, not the virus.
You know almost nothing on these topics, Snooty, you need to listen and learn. Israeli data shows natural immunity gives protection at more than 6 times the level of the vaccinations, which are admitted to be failing to give protection longer than six months. That’s why Pfizer is touting the boosters, which it had already told shareholders were its future route to profit.
Protection from natural immunity is likely to be higher than that, looking at the studies on those who had Sars 1, who were still immune to Sars 2 17 years later.
You’ve had two AZ jabs because you’re elderly – and you probably had no bad side effects, partly because of your age, the jabs are least effective in the old because of waning immune system, and because you’d had no previous infection.
But you will get Covid sooner or later because the jabs do not protect from getting the disease with symptoms, or from passing it on. That’s admitted by Sage, the CDC, etc. My neighbour had AZ in his late 40s, hacking cough for a long time could be heard across the gardens.
So it makes no sense to fine those who refuse the vaccines. It will be challenged in court.
fool
I don’t suppose they stick on supplements for winter sports? And I’m damn certain they don’t stick on supplements for gay men who indulge in dangerous sporting activities of their own. Hence the lawyers will have a very expensive turkey shoot with this ‘discrimination’. In fact – it won’t happen.
Them too. Where do I get a “vaccine” exemption card then?
A copy of magna carta, printed out at business card size.
Here…
https://www.nhsx.nhs.uk/covid-19-response/using-the-nhs-covid-pass/#exemptions
thanks
https://twitter.com/maccheeky1/status/1424811775992737792
So in order to force people to get injected with a still experimental (because it’s not gone through the standard approval procedures but only authorised on the basis of a spurious “emergency”) quasi-vaccine that we know does not prevent infection or transmission, that quite possibly doesn’t even reduce those things much, to supposedly protect people who themselves have already been injected with the “vaccine”, the regime is going to force the sacking of tens of thousands of care home workers in a sector that is famously short of staff?
If you don’t think the regime is either evil or stupid, then you just aren’t paying attention, frankly.
I seem to remember a recent piece about euthanasia within the NHS. Looks like maybe the care homes too. Say what you like, but don’t say we’re the granny killers.
“Hospitalisations largely preventable”.
Oh goody! So ” ‘Covid’ deaths” will be about one tenth of last Winter then, maybe less if there are additional factors such as the virus becoming endemic. Let’s see what actually happens…
“Change behaviour voluntarily”.
Oh no, this is coercive for some people.
But they won’t be low if the booster jabs drop immunity for two weeks – and if the repeated dosing causes ADE.
The thing is, I’ve been managing fine with a well-primed immune system for years. I’ve only had one day off sick ever – and this “novel coronavirus” is demonstrably not more dangerous than other bugs that have been going around in the last few decades. Why should people like me suddenly have to pay a lot extra if others are unhealthy? If I have flu symptoms etc. and am asked not to come in, fine, but if I look healthy, any risk is negligible.
I also have only had one day off sick, apart from as an 19 year old I was forced to take a week off when I had Rubella (German Measles), and as I worked with the public at that time, I was told I had to take a week off. I actually felt fine and would have carried on working from choice.
I would prefer to rely on natural immunity for this “novel coronavirus”.
Well quite.
For the first fifty years of my life I caught EVERYTHING. Then I was finaly diagnosed with a weird genetic form of diabetes. Obviously I was told to “base every meal on starchy carbohydrates” just like I was already dong. Fortunately thanks to the internet I met a bunch of clueful diabetics and even some clueful doctors. I bought a glucometer and soon discovered I needed to eat the exact opposite of what I was told.
Basically that fixed my immune system: in the last sixteen years I haven’t had the flu and only a couple of colds. Pretty sure I had covid in December 2019, it wasn’t pleasant (long lasting cough expecially at night) but I survived.
I was gobsmacked at how much difference a simple dietary change made (plus a few supplements). More people could do this only they are not told how. Basically when I eat how we evolved to eat my body works how it evolved to work. I can even work around my duff pancreas. Who knew???
The obese suffer COVID more severely, and are bigger transmitters. Is insurance going to be charged by the lb too?
There could be some hefty premiums in the states…
Sadly Will, the UK Obesity level (boosted by Scotland largely) has overtaken the US.
Oh, and do be fair, Bozo does his bit!
Yes, let tax the obese!! But that would be discriminatory wouldn’t it.
Given that the NHS spends 10% of its budget on Type 2 diabetes and performs 550 planned amputations per WEEK on T2 diabetics, then yes it should be charged by the lb.
More complicated than that, obesity and Type 2 diabetes are both IMO downstream of insulin resistance. If only there was a pocket insulinometer like a glucometer.
$50 a month? Amateurs, sheer amateurs.
Residential aged care workers who go to work unvaccinated against COVID-19 will be fined up to $20,000 under a state of emergency order signed by Western Australia’s Chief Health Officer today.
So… I guess we don’t do basic human rights any longer, or… ?
Not surprising really, basic human rights went by the board a long time ago (with the unborn and the disabled unborn).
The lawyers will be licking their lips…
More reassuring signs that the vaccine narrative is unraveling. They can’t coerce the virtue signalling conscience, because the vaccines don’t stop infections or transmission, so they are trying another form of coercion, fairly naked bribery…. The lawyers would have an absolute field day if this happened, but it won’t.
And I suppose these same employers are willing to compensate you generously if you are injured by the vaccine?
People who didn’t took the vaccine should receive money equal to the large amount of taxpayer money that was spent on rapid research, deployment and price of the vaccine, divided by the number of people in the country. People who took the vaccine already took this money when they took the vaccine.
People who didn’t get the vaccine should also receive reparations because of the abuse and demonization they receive from the government, good part of the media, public and businesses.
Of course, people who took the vaccine and suffered side effects form the vaccine should receive reparations but that’s another topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9KnhUu7Ba4&t=390s
Watch before YT deletes.
My fear in all this is that you can’t prove a negative.
Some who are doubly-vaxxed will maintain that it would have been worse if not for vaccine. How can it be proven it wouldn’t have been?
My only hope is that as more and more doubly-vaxxed people get hospitalised people will wake up.
Or even just get ill so the lie that these vaccines are a miracle are exposed.
I’m not sadistic, I get no pleasure in seeing people suffer but it’s really important that the scales fall from people’s eyes.
I hope so because anti-covid vaccine people will be the scapegoats.
And people have become so insane they will gladly have those who refuse shot.
To add: the Mail seems to be reporting a few ‘deaths even though doubly-vaxxed’ stories.
That is a good sign.
Not for the people who’ve side-by-side and I appreciate it is tragic for them and their families- but it hints that the tide is turning.
I’m also thoroughly sick of smug holier -than- though vaxxers, too.
Oh, people like Piers Morgan
Wow…I would pay the surcharge. because guess what? You cannot get any health insurance company in the world to insure you against ‘vaccine’ injury. I believe my health would be worth $50 a month…and I’d still be a ‘winner’
I rather doubt that your employer or their insurer would cover you for that – so, heads they win, tails you lose.
I would be very interested to learn what the insurance company actuaries think of this, since they are usually the people to trust over the likes of Billy Goates.
Likely they will be happy to recover additional premiums from workforce heath plans, but surely the unvaccinated pose little risk compared to the vaccinated now that Delta is becoming about as serious as one of the currently endemic coronaviruses going around.
Does a $50\head surcharge on the healthy unvaccinated provide enough cover for all the vaccinated and is it even ethical to rob the Peters of the unvaccinated to pay the Pauls who were jabbed and are suffering the consequences.
“The surcharge approach is intended to cause employees to change behavior voluntarily,” what a sentence hahaha.
So stop paying for insurance, and go abroad for treatment.