Coverage Of Vaccines In Private Health Plans: What Does The Public Prefer?
By Matthew M. Davis and Kathryn Fant
Health Affairs
May/June 2005
Immunization rates for the primary series of vaccines among children and for the widely recommended influenza and pneumococcus vaccines among adults fall short of targets set in Healthy People 2010. Lack of insurance and the resulting economic barriers have been blamed in part for these low immunization rates. In addition, immunization officials and policy experts have recently turned their attention to the problem of underinsurance for vaccines. The most recent estimates indicate that as many as 15 percent of children and more than 30 percent of all adults are enrolled in health plans that do not pay for recommended vaccines.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/24/3/770
Comment: It would be unimaginable that vaccines would ever be excluded from a universal public health insurance program. Yet many private insurers fail to provide such coverage.
Why do we continue to hand over to the private insurance industry hundreds of billions of dollars when they continue to demonstrate their gross incompetence and nearly criminal negligence in their coverage decisions?
Maybe we’re more to blame since we continue to agree to fund their expensive, wasteful administrative bureaucracies that are making decisions that kill people. Obviously we would never accept that if we had our own public program.