Fair Trade? No mandate in exchange for no hospital beds for unvaccinated
Elective surgeries and other treatments are once again getting delayed as hospitals become overwhelmed by unvaccinated individuals. Example below:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/12/28/…
Given the strong support against vaccine mandates (and getting the jab in general), would a fair trade be that, in exchange for no mandates, hospitals either reject or significantly limit ICU capacity for treating COVID amongst unvaccinated individuals? Would allow for everyone to move on with their lives and remove the biggest reason that politicians consider mask / vaccine mandates.
For the many libertarians on this forum, this would give people the right to choose what happens to their body, but also bear the consequences of their actions as opposed to having society bear the consequences.
To be clear, this is actually being debated already:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/12/07/…
and actually happening on a small scale:
First of all, the WaPo article you linked refers to the idea of unvaccinated patients being forced to bear the financial burden of their COVID-19 treatments without the help of insurance. The second article is about a single physician saying that he couldn’t bear the thought of treating another unvaccinated COVID-19 patient, so that he planned on refusing to do so. Nothing you’ve mentioned remotely rises to the policy you’re discussing, particularly the first article.
People burden the healthcare system all the time with their folly, although this time is more acute than virtually all other times. From all the stupid “Sex Sent me to the ER” type stories to cigarette smoking to atherosclerosis from diets that are scientifically proven to be unhealthy, people regularly impose avoidable strains on our healthcare system. The component of the Hippocratic Oath that says “do no harm” is not merely in the positive sense of not stabbing patients or something; it also refers to omissions of refusing to help people, which is clear from the prohibition on therapeutic nihilism that is often included in English translations. Yet that’s precisely the conduct endorsed by this policy.
Triage is triage, and should always be based on preserving the most lives, not going after the patients who “deserve it” with some moral invective because they made a series of bad choices (which taking the COVID-19 vaccines is a good choice). Doctors are meant to save lives, not pontificate on who does or doesn’t morally deserve their healing.
I agree with the general premise, but like you said you can’t compare it to refusing lung cancer to smokers, heart disease treatment to obese people, etc. Those diseases are results of decades of choices and cannot be easily rectified. On the contrary, taking a vaccine is quite literally as “quick” as it gets; if there were a vaccine for lung cancer, I’m sure people with lung cancer would take it. I don’t lean far to one side or the other on vaccines, but there is a lot more nuance to the whole unvaccinated people getting COVID thing, especially when you see how many are so vehemently opposed to it. You won’t find a smoker at risk of lung cancer saying “fuck lung cancer treatment”. Believe me, no one more than me thinks that the reason the US has been so fucked by COVID is because of how unhealthy our society is, but it does get tricky when you get into the issue of which hospital beds to give who.
If anything, one could argue that the decades of actions and decades of scientific evidence are weightier than the shorter faults of the unvaccinated today, which would mean that one would sooner refuse treatment to them than the unvaccinated. That’s probably a tenable argument.
Another important thing to delineate is that there’s a difference between doing nothing (triage as normal), giving vaccinated patients priority, and a blanket ban on giving hospital beds to unvaccinated people. Those are different policies with different degrees of defensibility. +1 SB
Thank you.
It's choosing who to help as opposed to "not help", with the underlying assumption that people are being denied treatment due to lack of availability as a result of unvaccinated individuals getting COVID. The examples you gave don't overwhelm healthcare systems and prevent others from receiving treatment at nearly the same scale.
That was made clear with my point on this healthcare crisis being more acute than virtually any time, so this isn’t really at contest.
A health insurance surcharge for bad behavior amounts to a Pigovian tax, which Pigovian taxes are already levied on cigarettes anyway, so what does another one matter? This is categorically different than hypothetically refusing treatment to someone for moral reasons.
One small scale example of this on a pre-COVID basis would be certain hospital trauma wards who were tasked with treating those injured by gang violence. Many of these people would be involved in organized crime themselves, and the trauma unit would likely be overrun from time to time, but virtually no one would argue that treatment should be withheld from these people.
No this is not a fair trade. What about people who can't take the vaccine due to health or religious reasons? Now they can't get proper hospital treatment? I am personally fine with the vaccine and booster, but you have every right to refuse it and still be treated at a hospital if your life is at stake.
Health, don't see why not if a doctor attested that you can't get the vaccine. Should be a very small portion of the population and not enough to overwhelm hospitals.
Religion... is tricky. Given Americans (actually just given everyone's, including muslims) view on jihad, i think people generally agree that you have a freedom to practice your religion if it doesn't harm others. If you're religion doesn't overwhelm hospitals, then feel free right. If it does, well, why should everyone else bear the burden of you practicing your religion?
On a peripheral topic, it is kind of dumb not to get vaccinated but even more dumb to boast about it. The lady who cuts my hair went on social media tirade about how it is your right to choose to get vaccinated. I live in a pretty liberal area and this tirade will certainly cause the salon to lose business. I guess you can’t fix stupid.
There's no need to turn this into a general vaccine thread, we're not convincing anyone that already has a facebook feed saying otherwise or has staked their political identity on being anti-vax. Rather, this is about a simple choice - you can feel free not to get vaxed, but you shouldn't be taking away hospital beds from all others as a result. You're not taking away a hospital bed from others if you're a smoker with lung cancer, because hospitals still have capacity.
If cucks in government allow needle exchanges they’ve lost any room to demand vaccines.
I think a lot of people would agree in a heartbeat to sign a document refusing all medical care related to covid in exchange with not having to comply with all these dumb rules. I sure as hell would…
The best way is to mandate vaccines no matter how much they kick, scream, or cry. It’s better in the long run compared to refusing them treatment because it would lead to needless death and suffering, even if those people are idiots.
The military has gotten to 97% vaccination, and most of the remaining 3% are waiting on an exemption (not a single exemption has been granted so far, since you need to get vaccines in order to join, and if you had religious/medical reasons where were they when you enlisted?). Only 200 people have been discharged from the marines for non compliance. It's not worth it to give up your livelihood for a vaccine that is orders of magnitude safer than the virus itself.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/12/16/politics/military-vaccine-numbers/in…
https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2021/12/30/marines-kick-out-troops-co…
I mean by that logic how about no hospital beds for anybody? If you got covid you were doing to much risk taking and therefore we shouldn't give you any support.
So when a doctor tells their overweight patient they need to eat better in order to avoid developing a preventable health issue such as heart disease or type 2 diabetes and the patient doesn't listen to their doctor and develops heart disease or type 2 diabetes should those patients then be refused medical treatment going forward? They were told by their doctor what they needed to do in order to stay healthy and refused to heed that warning, does this differ from people refusing to get vaccinated even after they have been advised to do so?
Some stats from the CDC for context on the impact of heart disease and it's prevalence in the US:
- 659k die every year; that's 1 in every 4 deaths
- Cost $363 billion from 2016-2017
Thank you, at least you have stats. Feel free to scroll up and see the discussion on how heart disease isn't preventing everyone that isn't suffering from heart disease from using the ICU or getting surgery, which is why we're having this discussion in the first place....
Not that it matters, but does the CDC stat explicitly say that all 650k of those heart disease deaths were due to lifestyle choices?
I did and it honestly seems like you can't grasp basic concepts, most likely just a troll though. When 1 in 4 deaths is caused by a single health issue (heart disease) I would argue that is a significant strain on the heath care system. And we don't actually know if people with heart disease were previously causing any sort of delays in things such as surgery as that honestly isn't news worthy or something a politician can gain political points for pointing out.
If we want to look at obesity in general which may not include such individuals with more sever illnesses such as heart disease we can see based on CDC data that from the start of the pandemic to November 18, 2020 that ~30% of Covid hospitalizations were attributed to obesity based on their models. The CDC also states that having obesity may triple the risk of hospitalization due to Covid. If there were even a 15%-20% decrease in Covid hospitalizations as a result of people just people not being obese then this wouldn't even be an issue. If less people were obese then there would need to be less hospitalizations from Covid, one could easily make the point that obesity is the cause for hospitals being at capacity and not Covid as those individuals would not need to be hospitalized in the first place if they were not fatties.
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