Continuing the discussion from People who aren't vaccinated - what should they be called?:
Without much research on this, my initial thought is that if health insurance companies could do this, there wouldn’t be many insured people, considering all the other health hazards there are out there.
Good point. But overweight people and smokers, and probably other higher-risk groups, pay more for insurance, so insurance companies do consider risk vs cost to some extent. And COVID would be the perfect place to draw a line, with the costs making such cuts very attractive to insurers.
I don’t think they can be dropped until the vaccine is fully approved at least and even then in the USA there will be really stupid religious exceptions.
What about those who had covid? If they have ongoing issues, (and apparently some do), are they considered ‘pre existing conditions’ and not covered, as a result?
It depends. Life insurance for sure. But the ACA drastically limited the way health insurance rates can vary depending on factors beyond age, sex, and location.
Smoking/nonsmoking is an allowed criterion but even that is not always the case. California’s version of Obamacare, called Covered California, does not allow smoking to be a consideration when setting rates.
Since vaccination is not specifically mentioned in the ACA as a reason to set rates, my understanding is that it cannot be used.
Under Obamacare, the insurance companies must cover those with pre existing conditions.
So probably not a very sound prediction. Though it would motivate a lot of people to get vaccinated who otherwise wouldn’t.
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And those who have health insurance through employment (most in the U.S.) can’t be excluded, although they might rightly be concerned about being targeted in the next round of company streamlining layoffs. And it may soon be appearing as a question on employment applications.
Managers shouldn’t have access to their employees health information, including vaccinations. My spouse works for a major health insurance company. They offered a bonus for employees to get vaccinated, but the bonus was handled through a third party. The bosses cannot target people for layoffs due to lack of vaccination, because they don’t have that information.
I’d be in favor of carving out an exception to this for purely prophylactic measures like vaccination - in the narrow sense that an employer should be free to require that employees be vaccinated as a condition of employment. Especially when failure to comply would endanger other people in the workplace.
But as to the OP - health insurance? No, the idea that healthcare should be withheld from people who make bad choices is not the right way to make people accountable for those choices. It was a huge uphill battle to achieve even the limited progress in the A.C.A. that stopped private insurers dropping people who are actually sick. It would be a retrograde step to undermine this by allowing insurers to reject people who refuse vaccination, moving us further away from the principle of healthcare as a basic human right that we should be working towards.
If you can withhold healthcare for failure to vaccinate, why not then for failure to make healthy eating choices, failure to get off the couch and exercise, etc.? Withholding healthcare is just not the right way for a civilized society to incentivize vaccination.
[ ETA: I hope I’m not out of line injecting opinion and debating this in this thread, or was this supposed to be a GQ-style thread? I’m honestly not too sure what the etiquette is in QZ, I think it’s on a thread-by-thread basis, right? I’ll report my post and ask for clarification.]
I know that when an employer sends people overseas, they are required to get inoculated against any diseases that may be prevalent there. I don’t know exactly how that is handled, and what parts of management would know, but I do know that if you were to refuse, then you would not get to go. It may be a part of the visa process, and your employer may not know any specifics, just that your visa was denied of something, but it would still be a requirement.
Also, health privacy is not a thing when it comes to whether or not you had COVID. If you call off sick, all you need as far as a doctor’s note is that you were unable to perform your work functions for medical reasons. If you call off COVID, you need to actually relay that to your employer.
Medical privacy laws don’t mean that nobody can know anything about anyone’s medical information If that were the case, then our health care system wouldn’t function at all (instead of functioning poorly, as it actually does). What they mean is that only the people who need to know your medical information can know it.
So the question is whether your employer, or your insurance company, or whoever, needs to know your vaccination status. And I think there’s at least an argument there that they do.
You should - but that doesn’t mean everyone does. And even if someone does relay that to their employer, that’s an entirely different issue from managers having access to that information. The people in my office don’t provide medical information to me - they provide it to the medical information officer who in turn provides some information to me. How long the person is expected to be out, whether they are cleared to return to work, whether they can return full-duty or whether there are restriction, etc - but no actual medical information regarding the reason they are out. I wouldn’t even officially be notified if someone was out due to COVID unless I was part of the contact trace - and I wouldn’t know whether someone was vaccinated unless I saw them at the vaccination site.
I’m happy to hear the various opinions on this. I’m not advocating a particular position, it just occurred to me that Covid has to be devastating insurance company profits, or soon will – I assume the government is currently picking up the tab, but that will (probably) end, and I can’t imagine insurance companies tolerating lower profits. And they do have good lobbyists. But as many commenters have pointed out, there are some protections already in place. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
It’s not as big a deal now as it was last year, or even up until March of this year. But last year, if you called off COVID, your employer had to give you up to 2 weeks paid leave, without it affecting any other PTO. This year, up until march, they didn’t have to, but they could, and could still get reimbursed for it.
So not telling your employer about your COVID diagnosis really only hurt you.
Depends on how big your office is. In my shop, I am the only one that deals with all of that.
Of course - my point was just that giving information to your employer doesn’t necessarily mean it goes to the people who can decide who gets laid off , etc. My husband works for a small enough business that they don’t have a full-time HR staff - but this sort of information goes through a company that his employer hired specifically to administer HR.
I’ve been informed by general counsel that I can ask for proof of vaccination from my employees. If they claim they can’t due to something like religious exemptions that I find suspect, I can also ask for evidence to back up the claim. If you have evidence to the contrary, I’d love to see it. I’ll even help and link to the vaccine guidance straight from the EEOC that speaks to the issue.
I’m just giving you my experience with one corporation. 
P.S. Can you link to the specific vaccine guidance, instead of general Covid guidance?
Sure.
Does that seem clear enough? I’ve also got DOJ documentation that says the same basic thing.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has issued guidance that allows employers, when vaccines are generally available and under certain circumstances, to require employees, even outside of certain essential and/or healthcare related occupations, to get vaccinated against COVID-19 before returning to the workplace. However, the component should provide alternatives, such as telework, for employees who cannot receive the vaccine due to personal or health reasons. The employer should also be cautious when mandating vaccination, due to potential tort claims arising out of any employees who suffer health complications from the vaccination. While a mandatory vaccination policy is lawful, there are many risks that accompany such mandatory programs. As an alternative for the time being, Components should strongly consider policies that encourage vaccination and continue to consider alternative work options for unvaccinated employees.
IANAL, but it seems to me that “generally available” is NOT the same as EUA.