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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday November 20 2019, @11:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the TANSTAAFL dept.

Bonkers pricing of "free" flu shots shows what's wrong with US healthcare

The annual flu shots that are free to those with health insurance are not immune from the convoluted and contemptible price-gouging that plague the US healthcare system.

Health insurance companies pay wildly different amounts for the same vaccines depending on how negotiations go with individual medical providers across the country. In some cases, providers have forced insurers to pay upward of three times the price they would pay to other providers, according to an investigation by Kaiser Health News.

The outlet noted that one Sacramento, California, doctors' office got an insurer to pay $85 for a flu shot that it offered to uninsured patients for $25.

Though $85 might seem like a trifling amount in the bloated scheme of the US healthcare system, such prices quickly add up as tens of millions of people receive a flu shot each year. And while the Affordable Care Act requires insurers to cover the full costs of all federally recommended vaccines, including the flu vaccine, any extra costs to insurers get passed on to patients through higher insurance premiums, economists told KHN.

Looking further at what insurers paid for flu vaccines, KHN found that costs spanned the whole range from $25 to $85. A doctor in Long Beach, California, got insurer Cigna to pay $47.53 for a shot, while a CVS in downtown Washington, DC, got $32 from Cigna for the same shot. A CVS just 10 miles away in Maryland got $40.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @02:39AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @02:39AM (#922807)

    The influenza virus uses Hemagglutinin to bind to the Sialic Acid present on the Columnar Epithelial cells present in the respiratory tract. It is literally impossible to get the flu (a respiratory illness) from something injected in your blood. In addition, there aren't many such sites in your body to cause a similar infection. The only symptoms most people get is from the general immune response from your body and if you are otherwise in good health, it is very possible to get literally no symptoms. In self-reporting studies, only ~57% of people reported any adverse effects at all, including a sore arm, and 12% reported their children had any symptoms other than a sore arm and the rate of adverse events is even lower, as in almost zero, the older you get, until you reach 65-70, where it climbs up to the approximately 5%. Even if those reporting rates are markedly lower than the real ones because people don't want to be "wusses," it is still far from a guarantee that you will get any symptoms, other than a sore arm, if you increase them by an order of magnitude.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @03:56AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @03:56AM (#922839)

    Wow only about 60% of people report any adverse event, and this drops with age? I wonder what else is reported to happen about 60% of the time and drop with age... Can you think of anything?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @10:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @10:41PM (#923192)

      Anti-vaxxers learning something new?