Who's Paying The Hospital Bills For Covidiots? Take A Guess

 

The Kaiser Family Foundation tells us that over 280,000 COVID hospitalizations between June and August of this year were preventable by vaccination.  They estimate the cost of those hospitalizations was over $5 billion. But, hey, don't worry! Their costs are largely going to be paid by us vaccinated folks:

While real-time data on the cost of all COVID-19 hospitalizations are not publicly available, various sources point to an average hospitalization cost of around $20,000. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reports that Medicare fee-for-service COVID-19 hospitalizations average $24,033. Another study of Medicare fee-for-service enrollees found an average COVID-19 hospitalization cost $21,752. A FAIR Health Similarly, our analysis of pre-pandemic private insurance claims for pneumonia hospitalizations with complications averaged $20,292 (though the cost for hospitalizations requiring a ventilator are much higher).

Our analysis of HHS and CDC data indicates there were 32,000 preventable COVID-19 hospitalizations in June, 68,000 preventable COVID-19 hospitalizations in July, and another 187,000 preventable COVID-19 hospitalizations among unvaccinated adults in the U.S. in August, for a total of 287,000 across the three months...

If each of these preventable hospitalizations cost roughly $20,000, on average, that would mean these largely avoidable hospitalizations have already cost billions of dollars since the beginning of June.

They conclude:

The monetary cost of treating unvaccinated people for COVID-19 is borne not only by patients but also by society more broadly, including taxpayer-funded public programs and private insurance premiums paid by workers, businesses, and individual purchasers.

Only a small share of the cost of a COVID-19 hospitalization is paid directly by patients themselves. In our analysis of privately insured patients hospitalized with pneumonia, the typical out-of-pocket payment was about $1,300. Out-of-pocket costs may be higher for people based on their health insurance plan and how the COVID-19 hospitalization costs are billed. That is a significant amount for most patients to pay, but it is far less than the amount covered by public and private insurance coverage.

Kaiser doesn't have data on how many of the hospitalized unvaccinated have grievances about "society's freeloaders," socialist healthcare, gubment spending, not being entitled to an ICU bed when they goddamn need it, the stolen 2020 election, invasions of brown people, critical race theory, etc., but we'd bet a Venn diagram would show significant overlap.  That just makes this preventable misery all the more infuriating.