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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: 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.