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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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday November 21 2019, @03:00AM (6 children)
It triggers an immune response, yes. However, without living viruses there's no actual infection, so it's just the initial immune response you have to deal with - maybe some minor discomfort for a day or two, quite likely nothing at all. While catching the flu will likely lay you down for a week or two. (actual influenza, not whatever unrelated cold you might call "a touch of flu" - there's a lot of other stuff also going around during "flu" season)
Of course the legitimate counterpoint is that in order to get a flu shot you will probably go to a doctor or clinic - a particularly pathogen-rich environment where you're much more likely than usual to catch something else.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @03:58AM (5 children)
Why are people just parroting talking points at me? Where did anyone say the flu shot is giving you the flu? A vaccine that doesn't make you feel sick, is a vaccine your body didn't respond to, is a vaccine that didn't work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @04:24AM (2 children)
You might be retarded.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @04:50AM (1 child)
Nope, you are just very wrong and have too low of self esteem to admit it to yourself.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Mer on Thursday November 21 2019, @07:23AM
sure vaccines made from weakened viruses were the first vaccines
sure some vaccines are made from whole viruses genetically tweaked to be harmless
MOST vaccines are just the empty shells of viruses without the RNA inside, because that's easier and less dangerous when it works
Shut up!, he explained.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday November 21 2019, @03:00PM (1 child)
Because you're wrong.
Feeling sick is almost entirely a reaction to an infection consuming your body to produce more of itself, while making you as contagious as possible (sweaty hands, cough, mucous, vomiting, and/or diarrhea are all infection channels promoted by the disease), NOT to your body learning to fight it off. And a vaccine only triggers the second reaction.
Unless you're allergic to the vaccine, at worst it will trigger a response similar to very mild allergies, and probably not even that. Think of all the diseases with no symptoms until days or weeks after your infection - your immune response fires up immediately - but symptoms don't begin until a critical mass of infection is present to cause the disease to change its strategy to Phase 2.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @10:06PM
Half, right, anyway. Still modded you insightful.
Sickness reactions are both the illness reproducing itself and also the body's defenses in fighting it. Fever (raise the body temperature because most pathogens are very temperature sensitive), increased mucous and other fluid production to isolate and contain the pathogen, achiness from inflammation (and the inflammation itself from histamine reactions again trying to constrict the pathogen's movement, as well as the body's innate defenses killing off the agent and leaving detritus which the body must then rid itself of or recycle), nausea (often from body chemistry changes from needing the sudden activation of the immune system), etc. Diarrhea is the body's way of trying to *clear* the alimentary canal by slowing moisture absorption from the canal and adding moisture to it in order to flush the pathogen out, not the illness acting. The sicknesses are just as much the body's "selfish" defenses acting as the damage caused by the illness. Passive defense before active defense can react.
That said, the active defense system takes time. It takes the body between one and two weeks to recognize the antigens, synthesize enough antibodies to attack them, then carry out that counterattack. (Plus train the B-cell memory cells which will recognize the disease next time around and mount the defense more quickly).
Vaccine reactions, if they happen at all, are usually the passive immune system reacting to some component of the vaccine. And if it is an actual illness.... you probably already had that illness incubating before you got the vaccine.