Refusing to Get Vaccinated Is Turning Into an Expensive Choice
Refusing to get vaccinated against COVID-19 was already a reckless health decision. Lately, it’s been turning into an expensive one, too.
Take the price of insurance. On Wednesday, Delta Airlines announced that it would charge unvaccinated employees an extra $200 per month for their health coverage and require that they be tested for the coronavirus weekly. At least part of the airline’s motivation was financial. Like many major corporations, the airline is self-insured, meaning that it pays the medical claims of its own workers, and in an open memo to staff, CEO Ed Bastian noted that the average hospital stay for COVID had cost it $50,000. While 75 percent of its workforce is vaccinated, Delta wants to push the number higher.
It wouldn’t be surprising if other big companies followed suit. A number of employers, from hospital networks to Disney, have decided to simply require that their workers get vaccinated or submit to testing. But for various reasons, others worry that mandates will seem too overbearing—Delta, for instance, might be concerned about blowback from Republican politicians in its home state of Georgia—and may prefer to prod their employees with insurance surcharges. One corporate consultant told the New York Times that about 50 companies had spoken with him about imposing these sorts of penalties.
There are probably limits on how much companies can increase premiums for the unvaccinated. Under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act—better known as HIPAA—employers generally are not allowed to charge workers extra for insurance based on their health status (the rule is somewhat similar to the Affordable Care Act’s regulations for the individual market). But federal law makes an exception for employer wellness programs, which can offer workers financial rewards or penalties to take steps such as quitting smoking. Vaccine surcharges would probably have to be structured under the same rules, which means the punishments for going without a shot can’t be so stiff that they can be considered “coercive”—a slightly fuzzy standard—and are limited to no more than 30 percent of the cost of individual coverage under the company’s plan. Delta seems to be keeping all of this in mind, though all their spokesman would tell me when I asked about it was that the company “is well within the plan and legal parameters to make this change.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/insurance/refusing-to-get-vaccinated-is-turning-into-an-expensive-choice/ar-AANQvVg
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