Pressure from the health care establishment to force COVID-19 vaccinations on one hundred percent of the population has powerful support from many employers who run their own employee health plans and are telling their subscribers either get a vaccination or pay higher premiums.

Despite reports continuing for more than a year that fully vaccinated and boosted people still get COVID-19, these policies persist. Six months after these reports, Nevada announced its public employee health care plans would charge unvaccinated state employees an additional $55 a month, and early this year Delta Airlines announced it would assess unvaccinated employees in its plan an extra $200 a month, despite the legal peril of potential civil rights liability such as faced by the NorthShore University Health System, which had to pay a settlement of $10.3 million and re-hire injured workers in a COVID-19 vaccine lawsuit to more than a dozen employees who were denied religious exemptions for vaccinations and lost their jobs.

“Additional health care costs are not what families need right now in our ‘stagflationary’ economy,” “Families who are afraid of being financially persecuted for their medical and religious choices would do well to consider Health Care Sharing...  Membership in a Health Care Sharing  is not insurance but rather a faith community bearing one another’s burdens through sharing medical expenses. Health Care Sharing  respect the reasons people either choose to be vaccinated or not.” 

Marty Makary M.D., M.P.H., Professor, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, and author of “The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care — and How to Fix It,” gave a warning this week on what to expect this fall. He said the strategy of federal health officials has been to avoid messaging on vaccination in late summer, but to ramp up for an overwhelming push for boosters this fall. Makary said, “They will get everyone fired up in September, but what we have to say as a country is, ‘before you push your booster on me, I’d love to see the data.”

With a new wave of finger-wagging from federal health care spokespersons about COVID-19 boosters, together with health insurance corporations already planning double-digit rate hikes, cash-strapped employers are using the unvaccinated as an excuse to raise rates in a discriminatory and legally dubious way. In this environment, the benefits of Health Care Sharing are hard to miss.