An editorial on CNN today made a bold suggestion. He thinks parents who refuse to vaccinate their children should pay substantially higher insurance premiums than those who do.
He gives the example of the San Diego parents whose child got measles and then exposed over 800 people to the disease. He estimates a cost of almost $125,000 in costs for this outbreak.
He says that the risk and cost of not vaccinating should be paid by those who make the choice, not the whole of society.
I totally agree with this logic, and I would hope it would encourage parents to get their children vaccinated!
If everyone is getting vaccinated except for a handful of Special Snowflakes, how are they more expensive to an insurer? Presumably they would be able to take advantage of herd immunity and not get sick, right? And if everyone else is vaccinated, then even if the Snowflakes are sick, then the rest of us should be immune. Right?
I guess the expense comes from treating them when they do get sick? In the San Diego case cited in the OP, did the child’s measles infect other people? If so, why weren’t they vaccinated? Or is it just scary because the child could have made everyone sick?
The last time I had an MMR shot was a long time ago (probably before I started grad school). Could I get sick from measles from an infected child?
Even if it does not cause an outbreak, it’s still quite possible and likely refusing vaccination can increase health costs. For example, there is a vaccine against spinal meningitis. If you don’t get the recommended vaccination, you run a higher chance of getting it and racking up huge health bills because of that. I don’t know any study that puts a dollar figure on the costs of non-vaccination, but I can easily see it causing more costly health coverage.
That being said, vaccination is actually not as clear cut as some say. There is a small, very small, risk that the vaccination can harm you. Because of that, it actually is best if EVERYONE around you is vaccinated and you are not. However, if everyone applied that logic then no one would be vaccinated and everyone would be worse off. It’s one of those things that for the benefit of everyone, you accept the very small risk of harm to yourself type of things.
So yeah, I could see charging more for insurance if vaccinations aren’t done. There probably is a financial justification for it. It’s also a method to encourage people to accept a small risk for a large benefit to society in general.
If you didn’t get the second shot (not administered to US patients until 1990, I think) then there’s a small chance you didn’t develop measles immunity at all.
No. Vaccinations don’t provide 100% immunity, but they don’t need to as long as average immunity rates ensure that each infected individual passes the disease on to less than one additional person. If this threshold has been reached, any outbreak will die out on its own, rather than spreading and exposing the entire population.
Some people can’t be vaccinated, for reasons other than batshit insanity. Very young children, for example.
Yep–and people with compromised immune systems, and people allergic to the vaccine or a component of it, and pregnant women (although they should get vaccinated before the pregnancy). Also, a small percentage of people don’t develop immunity after two doses.
I smirked reading it. A huge part of me thinks all non-vaccinators should be forcibly sterilized. But when you start to get into this kind of social engineering I start to get a little worried.
I’m not sure I want regulations governing any parenting behavior unless it is truly dangerous. For example, suppose someone chooses not breast feed. Formula is linked to all kinds of increased health risks in infants. Should we charge higher premiums if women don’t? Suppose a woman chooses to breast feed for only a few weeks rather than at least a year as many health organizations recommend. Should we charge premiums based on a sliding scale in that case?
What if a parent adhers to a modified vaccine schedule? I don’t agree and I could pull up studies showing this only increases the risk the baby will get the disease and does not decrease the risk of vaccine reaction. Should they pay a fine in that case?
Vaccines are not 100% effective, hence the importance of herd immunity.
Imagine a vaccine that is 95% effective and 99% of the population is vaccinated. An infected individual comes in and exposes 20 classmates. It might still spread, even though is likely that the one out of a hundred unimmunized individual is not in that class. But it might not and it is fairly unlikely to spread far. Now imagine only a 90% vaccination rate. On average two unimmunized kids will get it and maybe one immunized, maybe not … and as those kids go out and expose the rest of the school about a third of those who get infected will be those who have been vaccinated.
The actual real world numbers will depend on how effective the vaccine is, how contagious the germ is, and how close you need to be, but the basic idea holds. Those who do not vaccinate put those who do at risk.
Not breast feeding (by choice, I assume, not necessity) only affects one person - not vaccinating can affect many. Thus the extra risk is limited. Insurance companies already charge more for smokers - I suspect not breast feeding is unlikely to increase costs enough to make it worth the extra paperwork. Almost no one in my generation got breast fed, and we managed to survive.
My problem is that when you start to get into the whole issue of vaccination you usually don’t get non-vaccinators vs. vaccinators. You get a lot parents who unfortunately follow a modified vaccine schedule or don’t get all vaccines. According to a recent New York Times editorial that’s a full 40% of all parents! That’s a lot of people. One of the most popular parenting books of our time was written by Dr. Bob Sears. He advocates a really bad alternative vaccine schedule. His book has sold thousands of copies and gets mentioned on many parenting boards all the time.
What do we do to convince these parents of the necessity of vaccinating on time with the recommended vaccines? I’m not sure more financial penalties will work.
I have no problem with that. Then we could grind up Andrew Wakefield and use him to feed starving children.
The part that really scares me is just how big this problem is. Forty percent is a lot of parents. After years of watching this debate I’m still not sure how to convince people somewhat on the fence. There’s a real group of hardcore Jenny McCarthy followers that will never be convinced. How do you reach the wavering middle? My fear is we have to get a large polio outbreak or huge diphtheria epidemic to get through to people.
I would see this as entirely analogous to homeowner’s insurance that gives you lower premiums if you have an alarm system (and conversely higher premiums if you don’t). Those who take steps to reduce their risk are statistically less of a cost to the insurer.
Also, we should charge extra for fatties, smokers, non-compliant diabetics, drunkards, sleepers-around and any number of other bozos driving up my various insurances.
Unfortunately, at some point the liberal softies step in and want us to stop profiling…
Seriously; it’s basically an impossible distinction to make except with easy sorts definable and non-controversial rules such as higher auto insurance if you have DUI or speeding tickets.
This is really not a right vs. left issue. This is a public health issue. Both the right and left have a lot of idiocy on vaccines. The left has the Robert Kennedy Jrs and the crazies at Mothering Magazine. The right has the Phyllis Schlaflys and the anti science nuts.
We ALL have to do a better job to convince people that the anti-vaxxers are wrong. As Voyager pointed out if you are a diabetic that doesn’t directly affect me. Diabetes is not contagious. If you are so dumb as to refuse the MMR my three month old baby has no protection against one of the world’s most contagious diseases.
That should concern every single one of us. It should even concern Jenny McCarthy if she had a brain as one of the known causes of autism is prenatal rubella exposure.
It makes sense to me that if you not only increase the likelihood of higher health costs in your family through failure to vaccinate, but put others in the insurance pool at higher risk as well, that you should pay higher rates.
Or you could have discounts for following vaccine recommendations and the noncompliant parents can pay the standard rate.
I would do away with all non-medically justifiable exemptions for getting vaccinated. Your religion won’t permit it? Send the kids to a religious school that is willing to tolerate antivax attitudes, meets educational requirements, and carries a whopping insurance policy for compensating victims of disease outbreaks traceable to their student body. “Philosophical exemption”? Similarly, send your children to a private school where they can share germs with the offspring of philosophically like-minded gnorons**.
**just ran across this term on the blog Respectful Insolence. A gnoron is a person who’s a moron through willful ignorance.
None of whom put others in danger - except for smokers, and “drunkards”*, who are often arrested not just charged more for insurance. So if we go by your comparison they should not only be charged more; they should be arrested and jailed the way we arrest drunken drivers.
“Drunkard” seems almost 19th century; I can’t recall the last time I saw it used in a modern context.
Those that don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it.
Jenny McCarthy and her ilk were not alive when polio was a real threat. A large polio outbreak along with hospital wards full of iron lungs will fix this issue real quick for maybe the next 50 years.
