I understant that people might rationalize that the misfortune that happened to them is a random occurence, and they did the right thing, but man...
Your kid is young, he didn't need the experimental vaccine at all.
Science is hard :p
Good poker players can lose all their chips at the table to an unlucky draw and walk away knowing that they made the right play and that they'd do it again, even if they got unlucky on the river card. Good basketball coaches will still draw up plays to get the ball into the hands of their best shooter at the end of the game even if they miss sometimes.
If you're choosing between option A that has a 0.0001% chance of hurting you and option B that has a 10% chance of hurting you, and you choose A and still get hurt, that doesn't mean you made the wrong choice or that if you have it to do over again you should choose B.
In reality, we don't have that. We get whatever ideas have the largest marketing budget behind them, and we just have to trust them. It's more like "nobody gets fired for buying IBM (or pick your favorite pundit)" than running a poker scenario through a solver. And that's fine, I don't think you can expect much more than that out of people.
The stupidity of requiring people that already have antibodies to vaccinate, or even to require people to vaccinate. If you are worried, vaccinate and that's it, you are protected, don't impose others to do it. Especially a novel experimental vaccine that changes your genetic code.
Pick your poison, then.
2. The vax doesn’t prevent infection anyway, so whatever the point they are making is moot.
3. The risk is being compounded each time- first from vax, then from infection, then from boosters.
I don't understand why anyone would do that, perhaps only because they understood that it was a mistake and they want others to make the same mistake.
You're saying "If you survive getting covid without serious injuries once, then you'll be less likely to get serious injuries on a re-infection later". The vaccine is to make it less likely that you get serious injuries from that first exposure.
The argument makes more sense when you take into account that the interesting case is actually "given that you've already had covid, should you get vaccinated?" rather than "given no exposures yet, should I make out with someone that has it or should I get vaccinated". I've seen a lot of noise about the latter case, and a lot of overlooking the former.
COVID was around before the vaccines, and before the boosters, and between the boosters. Some of us got it before the boosters were available, and before the next booster was due. This is the context you're responding to.
For a stupid real world example, my college friend had COVID was required to get the booster while he was recovering from COVID, so that he could continue school after. There's plenty of nonsense still going around. Natural infection usually doesn't count in the school system, from what I've seen. Surprisingly it does, where I work.
Doctors help basically just "we don't know, there's no research, it will hopefully get better". It did after a year. Great. Govt pushed people to vaccinate to prevent the spread (despite individual's risk being very low) with promise to compensate in case of issues. lol, they didn't even compensate people who were paralyzed after vaccination with response "You can't prove it's from vaccination, sorry."
Zero benefit from the vaccination itself, since she didn't go for a second shot after this.
Cost/benefit very negative, since she likely didn't need the vaccination in the first place since she's not in the risk group and this was just "for the society" thing. And turns out it doesn't work againt spread much either.
Can you expand on this please? I find it extremely hard to understand how an ACA-compliant health care plan could "not cover" a hospital stay for myocarditis. Unless you're on a high-deductible plan and the entire stay was less than your deductible?
I suspect the maximum annual out of pocket.
Try being hospitalized without insurance. You'll find out really fast. (I was, twice, circa 2010. I was unemployed and uninsured)
However when going through the annual election process it generally makes it very clear how much you are paying out of each paycheck and what the employer contributes. Now whether people pay attention at all I can't say.
I think Obama-care (as much as I still support it in contrast to just letting private healthcare continue as-is) actually made things worse in the US by letting insurers and providers use the government involvement as a justification for their BS.
When you compare US costs to countries like the UK, France, Germany, Japan, and similar it is indeed true that US is significantly more expensive.
It is also true that over time US costs are rising significantly.
However, the ratio of US costs to the costs of other countries has stayed roughly the same over time.
In other words, the rest of them are having the same problem of rising costs that the US is, and their costs are rising at roughly the same rate. We pay a lot more than they do now because we paid a lot more than them a long time ago.
This is worrisome, because it suggests that even if we can lower our health care costs to be in line with the rest of the developed world we are still heading for unaffordable healthcare--all we'd be doing is making so we reach that when the rest of the world does instead of a few years before they do.
Here's some comments from earlier discussions with numbers and a link to the data [1] [2].
There is certainly some inefficiency in the US healthcare system but mostly it reflects the poor health of the population. Switching to some form of socialized medicine won't fix that problem. Other developed countries are doing a little better at the moment but they're on the same trend line and will inevitably hit the same crisis. At some point if we want to prevent a systemic collapse we're going to have to get serious about emphasizing prevention over treatment.
As a personal anecdote when I lived in the US there were three months in a row where I paid 10/pill, 3/pill and 1/pill (I also had earlier paid 0/pill when I qualified for VT medicaid) for the same medication[1] as I was 1) initially uninsured 2) covered by the "cigna preferred rate" but otherwise had no drug coverage 3) had regular drug coverage. As a bonus a few months after that run a generic for my medication came out and I paid .10/pill for the brand name because the generic existed but they didn't have it in stock.
Please explain how that makes any sense at all.
1. Concerta - the 54mg version now apparently retails for $545 per 30 here's a weird website talking about it (I now live in Canada and while there isn't Pharmacare in my province the drug is free with some cheap insurance) https://www.singlecare.com/blog/concerta-without-insurance/
Actually no, you still won't. Because the hospitals send out fraudulently inflated and fraudulently itemized bills to help their negotiating positions.
To know how much medical care actually costs, you need to have "insurance" and read through the itemized bills and explanations of benefits. The top line large number is the fraudulent amount that has no basis in reality, there is an "adjustment" based on the rates the "insurance" company has actually agreed to pay, there is the amount the "insurance" company pays them, and then there is your portion. Adding the last two, or taking the first minus the second, is as close to knowing how much something costs as you can get in this fucked up system.
Also it bears repeating, never pay a medical bill unless you're damn sure you're responsible for the amount [0]. Even if you have "insurance", often you'll get sent the fraudulent bill right away, and it will take a month or two for "insurance" to bother doing their job. Also billing departments have no problem blatantly lying to you about your (non) responsibility for the fraudulent bill, since it might get them more money.
[0] Of course some times they have you over a barrel like ongoing care getting denied if you have an unpaid balance. In which case you just have to eat it and then hassle your "insurance" company for half a year to get your money back.
In practice how do you do this? I've never got a medical bill that made complete sense to me and when I did argue it went around in circles for so many months that it was not worth my time so I just paid it.
Then, you need to know your general deductible and copayment schedule. The bill should show original charges (fraudulent), "adjustments" to those charges to make them line up with what your "insurance" company has negotiated to pay, and then payment by the "insurance" company. The part remaining that you need to pay should line up with your deductible.
If you've got a large deductible (common) and this is one of your first bills, then the "insurance" company won't have anything to pay, but there will still be an adjustment. If you think that is off, you can contact your "insurance" company to check if it matches their negotiated rates. In my experience, their customer service departments haven't been totally gutted yet.
Calling the provider's billing department is generally pointless unless/until you know exactly what you're talking about. Once, a phone rep (at a small place even) called me to nag me about a bill. I told them that their charge was above the Medicare limit for a service, and that it needed to be corrected before I could pay. In response, they insisted harder that I "owed it" and I "had to pay". I told them they were wrong, ended the conversation, and just waited. Lo and behold 4-5 months later they finally billed the "insurance" and sent the correct bill. I think they were just hoping I'd fall for their fraud so they could pocket a few extra bucks.
I'm certainly not an expert on this subject in particular, just generally experienced at cutting through the avalanches of paper that psychopaths try to bury us with.
The parent poster likely benefits from the following items on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act:
> Annual and lifetime coverage caps on essential benefits were banned.
> Insurers are forbidden from dropping policyholders when they become ill.
> All policies must provide an annual maximum out-of-pocket (MOOP) payment cap for an individual's or family's medical expenses (excluding premiums). After the MOOP payment is reached, all remaining costs must be paid by the insurer.
Obama was a sellout.
’Eat the food as you would a loaf of barley bread; bake it in the sight of the people, using human excrement for fuel.’ ... I said, ‘Not so, Sovereign Lord! I have never defiled myself.’ ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘I will let you bake your bread over cow dung instead of human excrement.’
We could be dealing with worse shit, however shit remains shit.
Sorry to hear that.
One of the massive negative side-effects of ACA will come to the national forefront in a few years. We now have tens of millions of people enrolled in Medicaid. What most don't understand is that, after 55 years of age, this isn't insurance at all, it's a loan you are required, by law, to repay.
Don't take it from me, here's a summary directly from the Medicaid website:
https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/eligibility/estate-recover...
I looked into this a while back. The State can place liens on your estate and your children could be stuck with a bill because of that. For example, if you have a home it is very likely that 100% of the value of your home will be consumed by your healthcare bills if you needed what I am going to call a normal level of care for that age group from 55 onwards.
In other words:
People were told they they were getting health insurance through Obamacare. In reality, they agreed to receive a credit card using their estate as collateral. If this isn't fraud, I just don't know what is.
Obamacare might just be the largest private-property grab by any government in the history of this nation, if not humanity. I wonder how many people actually understand they will not be able to leave anything to their children. Or worse, leave them a huge bill owed to the State.
These are the things that really rattle me: Politicians selling pushing programs in the most dishonest ways possible. How many people would have supported ACA had they were told they would have to sign-over their estate to pay for their after-55 medical bills? Very few, if any.
What really sucks about this is it affects the low to middle class portion of the population in a disproportionate manner. They are the ones who end-up on a Medicaid plan, not people who can afford to pay for something else. Once again, politicians claim to be for the little guy and, instead, they royally shaft them every time they are able to. All they care about is their votes.
Medicaid expansion is also just one portion of the ACA.
The low premium option is the least cost option if you don't use much healthcare, or if you use a lot; but there's a range somewhere in there where the higher premium plan may lower your total costs. Of course, if you're getting a premium subsidy, the calculation changes.
But yeah, Obama promised access to healthcare and delivered access to healthcare insurance. It's not unuseful, but it's not really enough.
If it were up to me, I'd lower the medicare eligibility age every year, and gradually grow the system, a couple decades later we'd have Medicare for All (ish, not all seniors are eligible).
An Obamacare Bronze plan is like the bank extending credit - they carry the umbrella after you when the sun is shining, but at the first drop of rain they disappear.
Of course, paying the hospital is usually sort of optional. They're most often happy to bill you later and send you to collections, and you can let it accrue. It's not great, but if you're so sick you can't work, what are you going to do about a debt you can't afford to pay? Better to not pay it.
These days, because of the ACA all plans are "emergency only", except without the lower premium.
They were cheap for a reason. They're back in force, if you want to grab one. I don't advise it. https://www.propublica.org/article/junk-insurance
These days all coverage is emergency only coverage, because of the insanely high deductibles. Except without the benefits of lower premiums.
I am aware that some things improved, but not for the average low risk person.
I do. My wife and I went bankrupt with it, via $90k in copays and coinsurance.
We had good insurance, but back then insurance could have uncapped costs of this kind. As a bonus, they could a) set a maximum annual and lifetime amount they'd pay and b) decline to renew our coverage, leaving only high-risk pools (4-5x as expensive for premiums) available.
I have a zero-deductible ACA plan. There are plenty of them.
How much does that cost? And which state?
No, that's not the case at all. We had to negotiate with the hospital and settled for this amount. The ACA covered none of it or a very small portion. I don't remember the actual bill, my wife dealt with all of it (she is a doctor and knows how to discuss such things with hospitals).
The ACA is not an insurance plan, so I assume you are using "ACA" as shorthand for "ACA-compliant insurance coverage".
It is simply not plausible that an ACA-compliant plan would wholesale "not cover" a hospital stay for myocarditis, absent extremely niche and bizarre circumstances.
Given that you don't seem very familiar with the specifics, I have to assume that your information is either missing some very important details, or incorrect.
Suppose the insured did use a non evidence supported vaccine or whatever, the vaccine itself would not be covered by insurance, but the healthcare needed by the damage caused by the use of unsupported medicine would be covered.
Similarly, health insurance has to pay for your healthcare if you get into a car accident and do not have sufficient auto insurance to pay for your healthcare costs.
Falling while skiing is not FDA approved. A woodcutting axe applied to the hand is not FDA approved. Drinking bleach is not FDA approved. And yet, health insurance will cover medical complications arising from any of these actions.
As a lifelong heart patient, I've had many post-operative stays not covered, past a certain duration regardless of my current condition and I've always paid for the highest tiers of health coverage (for over 2 decades now). I find it very likely that ACA would not cover" a hospital stay for myocarditis.
I'm of the personal political opinion that almost always when the government steps in to fund things on the demand side of the market equation it leads to massive growth in costs and burden for consumers. Universities are another great example of this. If they do step in, they also have to regulate the supply side as the free market is effectively broken at that point, and people who...say want to pay their own bills or for their own education by working or don't qualify for whatever government program is helping others, are screwed by the system.
Government intervention always seems to rake money into companies' pockets rather than helping consumers and tax payers.
> almost always when the government steps in to fund things on the demand side of the market equation it leads to massive growth in costs and burden for consumers. Universities are another great example of this.
I agree with all the points you make in your comment. I'll just add that the problem is far more complex than this. And, yes, it is all, 100%, caused by government intervention.
Without diving too deep, the problem starts with substandard education in the US all the way down to K-12 level. From there it goes to the insanely high cost of university education due to the government being involved in guaranteeing loan. Nobody in their right mind would give an 18 year old a $300K loan or $120K loan for a bullshit degree with no prospects of repaying it in their lifetime. Then we have heavy, expensive regulatory frameworks and horribly slow and bureaucratic processes to build or make just-about anything. And, finally, lawsuits.
When someone is laying on an operating table in the hospital, they are surrounded by a team with somewhere in the order of three to five million dollars in student debt. The same team likely spends somewhere close to a million dollars a year in liability and other licensing and insurance.
Each and every manufacturer of the equipment in that room and the tools used for the surgery, employs people with student debt in the range of $100K to $300K per person. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. The companies has huge regulatory, legal and insurance costs.
The hospital is in a similar situation. Millions of dollars per year in legal, insurance and other costs and a workforce that owes millions of dollars in student loans. Not to mention the various laboratories and services that make the hospital run.
If you follow the various tentacles and construct financial cost model showing what it takes for a person to be on a table in an operating room, the resulting number will be massive.
That's the key to our broken healthcare system and why no socialist utopia is going to fix it.
Until we fix the underlying cost structures driving the system, it is impossible to pass laws to truly control such costs. The "single payer" idea is, in this context, in a range between utopia and demented.
Why is it demented?
here's an analog: We take out one credit card with zero interest for a year. The intent is to use it to pay off all of our other credit cards within that period using this card by transferring the balance. People do this all the time.
Here's the problem: They don't change their spending behavior. Instead of ending-up with no credit card bills after twelve months, they wake up one glorious Monday now owing more money and having one more card to pay off.
You have to fix the underlying cost structure first. The problem can't be solved without this important first step.
This means getting the government out of education, student loans and a bunch of other areas. It also means demanding that the government be efficient and effective in doing the work we hire them to do.
The problem with this concept is that the people need to understand reality in order for them to vote appropriately. We don't have an informed citizenship. Not even close. We have clans fighting against each other and a few of us in the middle yelling "the emperor has no clothes!", and nobody listens.
Simply because they can and no one is going to stop them, so why not? This is the system working as intended.
https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-li...
According to this study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/ there is no increase in Myocarditis cases among unvaccinated people who have contracted Covid-19. This study tracked 196,992 people which is a huge number, so the data here is quite good and clear. Contracting Covid-19 does not put you at increased risk for Myocarditis, the same cannot be said when evaluating a population that simply received the vaccination.
> We estimated extra myocarditis events to be between 1 and 10 per million persons in the month following vaccination, which was substantially lower than the 40 extra events per million persons observed following SARS-CoV-2 infection.
and they include a brief literature review:
> Our findings are consistent with those from a case-control study of 884,828 persons receiving the BNT162b2 vaccine in Israel21. That study observed an association with myocarditis in the 42 days following vaccination (risk ratio of 3.24), but no association with pericarditis or cardiac arrhythmia. Two further studies from Israel add to our observations by providing clinical review to ensure robust case ascertainment22 and reporting investigations and outcomes in individual patients with myocarditis following the BNT162b2 vaccine23. Witberg et al.21,22 observed a small excess in events 3–5 days following the second dose of BNT162b2 vaccine, but most were mild presentations and just one classified as fulminant22. Mevorach et al. observed an incidence ratio of 5.34 for myocarditis in 5,442,696 persons following BNT162b2, although this was attenuated when restricted to the 136 definite and probable cases of myocarditis23. Risk of myocarditis was restricted to males under the age of 40 years and only observed following the second dose. Similarly, two studies from the United States have reported an incident rate ratio of 2.7 for myocarditis in the 10 days following the second dose of both mRNA vaccines24 and an estimated 6.3 and 10.1 extra cases per million doses in the 1- to 21-day period following the first and second dose of both mRNA vaccines, respectively, in those younger than 40 years25.
And conclude:
> In summary, this population-based study quantifies for the first time the risk of several rare cardiac adverse events associated with three COVID-19 vaccines as well as SARS-CoV-2 infection. Vaccination for SARS-CoV-2 in adults was associated with a small increase in the risk of myocarditis within a week of receiving the first dose of both adenovirus and mRNA vaccines, and after the second dose of both mRNA vaccines. By contrast, SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with a substantial increase in the risk of hospitalization or death from myocarditis, pericarditis and cardiac arrhythmia.
It checks for the myocarditis infection from COVID-19, but it doesn't actually control for vaccination status. The people studied either are believed to have been COVID-19 infected, or had been vaccinated, but there was no designated unvaccinated control group.
In which case, you are potentially using "breakthrough cases" of COVID-19 causing Myocarditis to make your point (assuming they would be the same pre- and post- vaccination), rather than a definitive look at people who did not get the vaccine and how they fared. All the study proves is that COVID-19 infections cause increased Myocarditis... in vaccinated people. If you assume that COVID-19 has the same Myocarditis effect in vaccinated and unvaccinated people, it works; but if you accept that maybe the effects of COVID-19 are different in vaccinated people, it could fall apart, which is why the study about how Myocarditis doesn't seem to effect the 160,000+ unvaccinated people studied still has value.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA....
Risk of myocarditis following infection before vaccination was 11.14 [95% CI, 8.64–14.36] greater than the risk of vaccination, and risk of myocarditis following infection after vaccination was 5.97 [95% CI, 4.54–7.87] greater than the vaccination itself.
Easier to digest press release:
https://newsroom.heart.org/news/myocarditis-risk-significant...
It's a decent data point but not conclusive.
The German vaccine watchdog issue a warning letter because there were roughly 300 cases in total reported for the approx. 200m doses administered until May 2021 in the entire EU.
Myocarditis/pericarditis are very rare and the effects for young people were mild.
Moreover, clinical myocarditis and pericarditis are only tips of the iceberg:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vveMHtVk_mY
People who have no significant symptoms can still have troponin in their blood, indicating damage.
More often than not it goes away on its own, but the sad thing is there is no surefire way to treat either condition. I've been to the best pericarditis/myocarditis doctors in the world, and I'll let you in on a secret - even these people don't know. Docs will throw Ibuprofen, Colchicine and steroids at it, maybe an experimental drug, or sometimes will just take that portion of the pericardium out. If it's myocarditis, well then, hopefully the medication works.
Like I said, the damage is irreversible. A year or two have passed for some of these kids. Many of them won't experience the long term effects until much later in life, or when it recurs. Just like the scar forms on the outside of the body, scarring forms on the areas damaged in the heart. A young person's heart isn't going to feel the immediate effects, but over the course of 10/20/30 years, quite the opposite.
I'm not anti or pro COVID vax as there is no reason to be tribal here, but there was definitely a more pragmatic path than simply vaccinating everyone. The logical side of my head says these kids were unjustly exposed to a risk they never should have been exposed to. It just doesn't make any sense why a healthy kid should take a vaccine when they could still spread COVID. We were all in the dark about this at that time, but the lack of debate and long term studies should have at least raised some kind of flag for people, especially the average Hackers News user. You cited 300 cases in 200 million like it's no big deal, but that is not justification for the 300 families or parents who voluntarily or forcefully exposed their children to this vaccination. Even if it's just a blip, it's 300 too much, not to mention all the cases across the world.
And again: becoming exposed to Covid without vaccination has even higher risk for myocarditis.
https://www.pei.de/EN/newsroom/dossier/coronavirus/coronavir...
Still I thing the whole thread of discussions shows that people are afraid of something which isn't such a big deal.
I am being as honest as I can be with regards to our feelings on this. I can't say we are angry about that incident at all. I think I can say we are not happy about not having been provided with all of the information before he got his shot. Frankly, I don't even remember if the data was available (I do think it was, BTW). Remember, at the time, only about 700 cases.
Of course, the outcome might have had something to do with the lack of negative emotions. I can probably admit our position today would be massively different had we had to face a range of negative outcomes post-hospitalization. These can range from life-long afflictions to death.
You and your partner were intentionally deceived; by your government *and* The Healthcare Industrial Complex.
Your child was hospitalized.
You had to go 5 figures out of pocket to pay for that care.
And you're not angry?
God bless you. You've got super powers I can't begin to imagine if I lived through those circumstances.
"I think I can say we are not happy about not having been provided with all of the information before he got his shot."
You pretty much hit the nail on the head here and is my biggest gripe about this whole fiasco.
I'm not sure about your situation now, but if this disease recurs and you feel like your kid's heart doctor has no idea what they are talking about, I recommend either Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic. I don't have Facebook, but I've been told there are many support groups for this disease as well there.
Good luck to you, and my prayers go out to you and your family.
The vax didn't/doesn't prevent transmission.
The vax may have increased asymptomatic cases and thus led to transmission.
Hospitalization or not, there are many who should be angry, yet somehow rationalize playing along with the ruse-y narrative.
Seriously? That's shitty. What's the insurance company's rationale for denying the claim?
Isn't there some kind of government fund to compensate people for vaccine side effects? Seems like you'd have a strong claim to get reimbursed from them.
They didn't, if the parent poster only got billed $10k. Two weeks in the hospital costs more than $10k; that amount is likely their insurance plan's annual deductible, coinsurance, and copays.
These expenses were a thing pre-ACA, to be clear; deductibles, coinsurance, and copays existed before it. The ACA capped the amount you can be charged.
As in you paid the whole cost, and it was $10K, and it didn't count on your deductables / out of pocket max? Or the patient paid portion was $10K, the insurance paid portion was $0, but now you're a lot closer to your maximums?
Did you file with the CICP? https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrze...
Yes, we did. It's worse than dealing with the DMV. I don't know where we are in the process other than my wife (she is a doctor) telling me not to hold my breath.
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that. I just wanted to make it clear that, despite this incident, we have not changed our position with regards to vaccines of any kind. That's not to say we might exercise more caution in the future.
I'm curious about this. In my world COVID is over now. I live in San Francisco. Nobody I know is getting boosters or is worried about it anymore.
Where do you live and what are the circumstances like there that you're considering getting your "next" one? (you've been boosted before?).
The problem is it has to stop everywhere for us to get complacent. Especially, given that everyone wants to travel -- and travel abroad.
Pandemic is here. Nothing is over. We are distracted with other things. Things are "good" in San Francisco and the Bay now. No guarantee it will be so tomorrow.
That's not really established for COVID-19.
Also, endemic doesn't mean something doesn't matter. In much of Africa, malaria is endemic.
What you mean is "As a society we stopped caring."
E.g. I see lots of young not wearing masks to protect themselves, and I see more older people protecting themselves with masks. Seems like a reasonable balance.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/pandemic-vs-endemi...
It does not describe severity. Ebola is endemic in parts of Africa. I still hope nobody gets it.
We can change the meanings of words for political reasons but who do we do a disservice too?
Given that it is a word from my mother language I find it a bit insulting when politicians decide to change my language though to benefit for a year or two.
Tl;Dr: Saying that covid is "endemic" to the whole world, is an insult to my ears, logic, and a whole language and people. They should pick a different word if they want to disagree with doctors worldwide.
I think we just have a new normal in terms of life expectancy and mortality :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_influenza_statis...
Furthermore, respiratory disease avoidance on a society-wide scale has never and almost certainly will never be achieved. The assumption that it is an attainable goal is truly nuts.
A CDC study found that people who wore N95 masks were 83% less likely to get covid than people who wore no mask,[1] but that overstates their effectiveness. People who wear N95s tend to behave differently than people who don't wear masks. They get vaccinated more, avoid gatherings, and generally try to reduce their risk of infection in other ways. Also the timing of the study is important. It was conducted before more infectious variants such as omicron were around. And since it was conducted when California required masks indoors, only 5% of participants claimed no mask usage. So the study compared N95 people against the most hardcore anti-maskers, not the typical person who doesn't wear a mask these days.
It is for these reasons that I would bet that the real effectiveness of N95 masks is around 50%, not 83%. Useful, but not something that lets you go back to normal life risk-free.
Covid definitely isn't over, it's just that we've gotten better at treating it and people have decided that they are over it. It is still killing almost 2000 people a week in the US and it's very possible that we will see a huge spike in that as we get further into winter.
the "next" booster is referring to the updated vaccine that more effectively targets the dominant "Omicron" variant.
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/six-recent-covid-deaths-...
That's why the age skew is so high.
The last time it was under 2000 was july '21
Ah thanks for the context.
I've only gotten the J&J vax (the worst one?) back in April of 2021, no boosters. I considered getting one but by then they were recommending boosters every few months and I decided to just "risk" it by not getting them? (I'm in my 30s and in good shape/health so don't feel vulnerable, but I understand that could be hubris and back-fire).
Back in those first few months I was keeping an eye on reports of side-effects, and J&J actually looked like the safest of the 4 available in the US. But it and AstraZeneca got absolutely vilified while any claims against Pfizer and Moderna got ignored as crazy conspiracies.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographicsoverti...
These stats don't indicate whether other confounding factors led to an individual's death.
The boosters likely make sense for some people, but there's little real data on their effectiveness. Outside of the more vulnerable, I'd avoid them personally. The proof just isn't readily available of continuous boosters being worth it to me.
Los Angeles.
I know lots of vaccinated people who are getting infected. Just last week I went to a conference here in LA. I was going to meet-up this week with on of the people I saw there. He told me he got COVID at the conference.
Yes, I've had one booster. I travel a lot for business. I think it might be prudent to take further precautions. I have no reason to believe this is unsafe for me.
When I got it, I was a healthy, fit person without any of the comorbidities that go along with COVID.
Last week I had a mountain biking accident and broke half my ribs and punctured a lung. Then I got COVID in hospital. Fortunately it was quite mild, and even that was a bit of a nightmare as coughing was hell and I had quite low blood oxygen.
Given the risks of a booster are so low (though non-zero) and the risk that your health can change before you manage to contract COVID, it seems like the smart proposition to me to get the booster.
In my family sphere, covid is over. Though, to them covid was always overblown with the response being worse than the illness.
In my main friend group, most still feel we are still in the middle of covid. Though, from my perspective, their words/fears seem to differ from their actions.
Your San Francisco social circles are different from mine. Most people I talk to about this got the bivalent booster and got the old booster last year.
But people do not seem super worried at this phase. The booster is something routine like a flu shot.
I don't recall it ever being sold to me as that, and though I regularly get them, I've never gotten a flu shot with that expectation. It reduces your odds and makes the thing more mild. That's the point. That's what I've been told my whole life. They're not magic solutions to everything in your life, they can't even be 100% sure about how to tweak them for the dominant strains that season, but they help.
This stuff makes people go a little crazy with unreasonable expectations. I remember people complaining in pre-pandemic years ... "the flu shot is only x% effective so why bother?" And the reason has always been that x > 0, any two-digit number for x is pretty worth it, even if it intuitively sounds small. It's pretty similar for COVID.
We really don't know much about this virus and by association it's vaccine - it does not behave like the flu - lost a colleague to Beta who was way fitter and way healthier than me (he did Murtai and BMI) - he ended on a ventilator and died, and I was just man down for week and a half at home.
It still took me weeks to recover back to myself again - still got the booster shot afterwards.
that angers me too. america bumbled its way through the pandemic, and we're no closer to getting single payer healthcare. not even for medical care related to the pandemic, which is collectively beneficial.
They may be saying the hospital or some provider within it was out of network, challenge this on the grounds it was an emergency. Challenge everything on the grounds that it was an emergency.
We had excellent grounds to challenge a few of the charges from the hospital (clear billing mistakes), but it never got to the point of evidence. We just called to argue and they instantly dropped them. I would strongly advise just calling and complaining and seeing what that gets you.
Many hospitals offer interest/fee free installment plans, you just have to ask.
I am, by nature, a mild mannered (perhaps even meek) person, but let me tell you that just doesn't work with hospitals and insurers. Their process requires you to take an adversarial/demanding role with them otherwise you will not just get billed unnecessarily but also not receive all the care you are entitled to.
This isn’t true at all, the ACA did a lot of mandating what insurance companies must cover, what maximum deductibles were, etc.
Edit: ah, yes, found the sub thread on cicp.
You had 15 kids at the time? How many kids do you have now? My hat is off!
The ACA individual mandate penalty was eliminated in 2017.
The ACA destroyed the prior insurance market. There is no way we can get what we had before for $650, in terms of cost, coverage and quality of care.
Calling this out as bullshit. Show me a reference.
You can get a PLATINUM plan on the California exchanges for less than that for a family--and your co-pay for everything will be under $250.
I would also like to point out that "myocarditis" qualifies as a preexisting condition. Without Obamacare, your child would never be able to get health insurance at all.
You mean, like this:
https://i.imgur.com/iIz30xw.png
Take note of the rating.
The fact that they are labeled "Platinum" is nice marketing. We've had family members and friends on some of these plans, they are --and I am being kind-- not great.
The context shouldn't be what's on the CA exchanges today. It should be what we and others had prior to being forced into ACA. Which was fantastic insurance for the entire family for $650 per month. Our deductibles were half what they are today and we had all the catastrophic stuff just the same. I assure you that, with my wife being a doctor, we did not have shit insurance.
What should horrify everyone is that, today, in the US, a family has to spend $30K per year for health insurance. That's just insane.
Before you say "we don't". If you get your insurance through your employer you should ask them how much they are spending for your insurance. Unless they got you on a shit program, they are likely spending $20K to $30K on you. This is money that is not available to give you a raise. In other words, you are still suffering the consequences of the ACA scam, you just don't know it.
Oh, yes, and don't get me started on the Presidential promise that families would save $2,500 per year, keep their doctors, etc. We went from $7,800 per year to $27,600 per year. More than that actually. Due to the high deductibles we have to spend thousands of dollars per year before any of it actually kicks in. I haven't done the math at this point. I would not be surprised if we've reached $40K.
Again, no problem helping others. That doesn't mean robbing families of tens of thousands of dollars per year. That's fucking criminal.
I know many don't feel this way. That's only so because they have never been on the receiving end of something like this. We love to talk about the concept of "fair share". Well, tripling health insurance costs isn't anywhere close to "fair share", it's government-enforced theft under false promises.
I'm standing here with a friend who got full mental health care ($0 copays for almost everything) from "Sharp Health" and didn't even need to use the exchange to get the rate ($600/mo direct retail from Sharp). Kaiser is on the same order of magnitude.
Hell, even straight up Blue Cross/Blue Shield is better than what you picked. Good grief.
> The context shouldn't be what's on the CA exchanges today. It should be what we and others had prior to being forced into ACA. Which was fantastic insurance for the entire family for $650 per month.
Okay, okay, let's refresh your memory:
My mother was widowed and had to buy health insurance at 60. She got lucky and could tap into the PA Teacher's Pension system for a mere $1,100 per month. She paid that for 5 years until Medicare. This was prior to Obmamacare. Where was her $650 plan?
My wife was 35 and had sleep apnea and her cheapest plan that would even cover her was $3,500 per month with an enormous deductible. This was prior to Obamacare.
10+ million people couldn't get coverage. "Excision panels" worked hard to dump you off the rolls the moment you tried to use them.
Okay THAT was the system before Obamacare. Remember now?
What you are pining for was the old "indemnification" system that was due to the extremely strong labor unions. Unfortunately, that went away in the 80s due to the rise of the HMOs and the fact that everybody dumped on the labor unions. Many of us fought against that knowing that the HMOs were picking off the "profitable" people and were eventually going to to collapse the indemnification system--which is precisely what happened. And then the HMOs weren't so profitable once they got those patients and would dump them--which they did.
And THAT was the situation before Obamacare.
The objection everyone's having is that the $2400/month plans are exceedingly unlikely to refuse a medically necessary hospital stay for myocarditis. People are trying to figure what critical piece of information is being left out there.
> Oh, yes, and don't get me started on the Presidential promise that families would save $2,500 per year, keep their doctors, etc.
Nothing in the ACA changed how doctors pick which insurance networks to honor, but if you switch insurers as part of picking an ACA plan you may have a different network just like you'd have if you did so with a non-ACA plan.
You're highlighting ongoing problems with the American health insurance industry and falsely portraying them as ACA-specific. High-deductible plans were on the rise with insurers before the ACA (https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/snapshots-the-p...). Premiums were going up 5-15% a year before the ACA (https://www.fastcompany.com/40470468/this-scary-chart-shows-...). Doctors were dropping insurers before the ACA. etc. etc. etc.
Again, look at https://www.fastcompany.com/40470468/this-scary-chart-shows-....
1999: a bit over $5k/year in average premiums
2009: about $13k/year in average premiums, the year BEFORE the ACA was passed
The whole point of the Platinum and Gold plans is that you pay more upfront each month in exchange for lower out-of-pocket expenses when you actually utilize your insurance.
Chances you kid would have gotten any troubles from covid are statistically absolutely negligible, given his age and hopefully absence of other illnesses.
Now you can blame as anti-vaxxer and sorts, but at least I didn't get myocarditis.
it boggles my mind that despite being plugged into an information network people can be this staggeringly ignorant about the wild success of vaccines
Hard for me to consider that anything other than a wild success. Is it perfect? Of course not. Do I wish it was better? Obviously. But it reduced the risk of COVID significantly for a huge number of people.
Those of us in countries that had successful lockdowns look at the mortality rate of those that were not able or willing to do so & pretty thankful we were able to postpone the virus until the vaccine was deployed.
I live in a place which has the unfortunate claim of longest, harshest lockdown in the world (Victoria, Australia). Multiple lengthy lockdowns, curfews, masks outside enforced by cops, sitting on the beach was illegal, taking kids to park illegal; people were literally chased down the street by cops demanding to "see your papers". Many cops resigned, and now in 2022 Victoria is struggling to find new recruits after a mass exodus of cops - many of whom did not agree with the job they were ordered to do.
Most people here do not consider those lockdowns a "success", and experts including epidemiologists have referred to our lockdowns as "draconian", and harmful.
Now, in 2022 we have more covid deaths than before, and that's with a very high rate of vaccination in the community, particularly the older age groups. But they're still dying at a record rate. The virus still spreads and still takes out vaccinated and boosted victims. Therefore, I would never adopt the blanket "thankful" rhetoric that you've shared. Thankful for lockdowns, thankful for mandates, thankful for what is frankly, an underwhelming vaccine compared to other vaccines. Yet, "saved millions of lives" is the go-to catch-phrase, and anything else can't possibly be true. Can it.
I don't think it's totally unfair to call it 'underwhelming' though. We are so used to vaccines being wildly successful at stamping out a bunch of diseases that when something as virulent as this comes along & the efficacy isn't as high (in no small part due to the fact that so many countries decided to make it the only line of defence), it's easy to be disillusioned.
I live in Queensland, Australia, where we had lockdowns that were similar in harshness but much more limited in length. I am very familiar with the Melbourne lockdowns (one of my colleagues got stuck there for months after he got trapped there after going down for a 1 week holiday).
We probably just got lucky that we didn't have a Melbourne-style outbreak. But the simple fact is the lockdowns prevented us from having a widespread outbreak before the vaccine was deployed. The lockdowns sucked but my anecdata from my network (certainly generally privileged people whose careers were not wildly affected, so not a representative sample) was the lockdowns were worth it.
It is trivial to look at mortality rate data between, say, US/UK and Australia to see the impact that the lockdowns had. It's simply undeniable that they saved lives. People complaining loudly about 'draconian' tend, in my experience, to be dipshit libertarians that would never brook any lockdowns under any circumstances simply because of their insane political views. Others complaining about lockdowns not working tend to be talking about their own lockdowns in their own contexts which were not as harsh as Melbourne (which, arguably, ended up working).
Of course we have more COVID deaths than before - we've dialled back all the preventions! The policy decision was made to let COVID run free through society and that the vaccines (which we both agree are imperfect, but perhaps I'm the only one that acknowledges they're vastly better than nothing) were the only mitigation that we're apparently willing to tolerate.
We've done fuck all about it and everyone seems surprised that the body count is still so high. I don't know why people are still surprised people are dying - we've clearly decided the policy position is to sacrifice people on the altar of the economy and that people are bored of dealing with COVID. We're not bothering with other mitigations despite it being a top 5 cause of death in Australia (top 3 in the US?).
The pursuit of being a responsible citizen can cause people to find themselves in the red zone. Pushed by coercive campaigns designed to make you not only think and act a certain way, but also spread the message and attack those who disagree. It's fascinating stuff.
"Dipshit libertarians"? Wow. I do wonder where the line is, if any, for those loyal to whatever lockdown rules are enforced. 100 days at 2 hours of outdoor exercise per day? Or are you the ambassador of compliance, willing to sign on to 500 days lockdown, 9pm curfew, and 5km travel limit from home.
It so happens that one of those "dipshit libertarians" who used the word "draconian", is professor Adrian Esterman. He appeared on TV in Australia many times during the pandemic, encouraging vaccines and encouraging preventative measures. He promoted caution and safety every time. But even he used the word draconian in an interview to say "no, we don't need draconian lockdowns" when asked recently whether lockdowns are needed again.
> "Of course we have more COVID deaths than before"
What do you mean "of course"? If you're suggesting everything that has happened was expected, you'd be wrong. Experts have REPEATEDLY said the virus has surprised us and behaved in unpredictable ways. The increased deaths in Australia this year were NOT expected.
And finally, part of the data about vaccines saving lives, comes from the over-represented numbers of unvaccinated people ending up in hospital. Early on at least, this was repeated often, with the footnote jab "pandemic of the unvaccinated". While the statistic is generally accepted, there are many factors involved in why certain people end up in hospital with covid. You may not have considered that unvaccinated people were more likely to take LESS precautions in general. After all, they didn't bother getting vaccinated, even though they were in the high risk age group. So they wouldn't take precautions with social distance, or hand sanitizing, or reducing social events. Those who quickly got vaccinated however, would be more likely to be cautious - therefore stay at home, social distance, and generally avoid the virus. But was anything like this discussed in relation to higher representation in hospital? No way. Nothing like that was ever discussed because they were so focused on pro-vaccine messaging. All we were left with was "pandemic of the unvaccinated", and a large group-think onboarding of that message, the remnants of which still can be found in posts such as yours.
This is so wrong I don't even know where to begin
It's not a single separated case as you may want to counterargument.
A vaccine "wild success" is only attributable to financial statements for big pharma. This is really wild, I'll give you that
Just did a search on CoveredCA. Monthly premium for Platinum Plans for a family of 4: $1200-1800 for a zero-deductibleplan (range includes Blue Shield, Kaiser, Anthem, Health Net, and OSCAR).
Because, as the CoveredCA website points out: "Platinum and Gold plans have a $0 deductible."
The whole point of the Platinum and Gold plans is that you pay more upfront each month in exchange for lower out-of-pocket expenses when you actually utilize your insurance.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 eliminated the fine for violating the individual mandate, starting in 2019. (The requirement itself is still in effect.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act
Furthermore how many people are covered by that $2400 a month? I'd assume it's at least 4 if not more?
But one thing I don't understand, are you saying that before Obamacare, the situation would have been better? If so, how?
Personally, I wish we had a healthcare system where people are simply covered for this sort of occurrence automatically.
We are still not anti-vax at all. In fact, I might go for my next booster today.
The one thing that angers me is that this incident cost us $10K. Obamacare, which was forced upon us and costs us $2,400 PER MONTH, did not cover it. We have no recourse whatsoever for this incident and any future care requirements.