A very bad idea has picked up more steam than it deserves in recent days. Fed up with surging Delta cases and lagging vaccination rates, commentators have begun to opine that unvaccinated people ought to pay more for health insurance, or pay full freight for any care they require if infected. “Don’t want the COVID-19 vaccine? Then pay full cost if you land in the hospital,” declared one headline in MarketWatch. Elisabeth Rosenthal, the Editor in Chief of Kaiser Health News, argued for similar financial penalties in The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC. Even prominent medical ethicist Arthur Caplan joined the chorus, telling an interviewer on WBUR that unvaccinated people ought to be held liable for the impact of avoidable ICU treatment on overall spending: “If you won’t vaccinate … you have to pay a financial penalty if you won’t drive down health care costs.”
It may be a seductive argument, but it’s nevertheless an utterly gruesome notion that deserves unequivocal repudiation before anyone spends another damn minute considering its implementation. It’s callous and not likely to work. Moreover, it threatens to undermine what little popular and political progress we’ve made toward universal health care.
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