Getting vaccinated

[BoSoxGal]

Ditto. Idaho and other states are not triaging ICU beds because people are being unnecessarily admitted. Quite the opposite, in fact:

As the Delta variant of the coronavirus tears through Idaho and the rest of the US, Souza said he and his St. Luke’s colleagues have noticed several important differences from the December 2020 surge. Patients are younger (averaging 58 years old, down from 72), they are sicker and require more mechanical ventilation, they are staying in the ICU longer, and they are dying more frequently (the ICU mortality rate has jumped from 28% to 43%). Some 80 people have died from COVID in St. Luke’s hospitals in just the past three weeks.

I hope folks here read that entire article you linked before claiming that medical professionals are making bank on mild covid19 infected patients and overstating claims about the seriousness of the current surge.

Where I read on Reddit there are numerous doctors and nurses posting from the frontline. Many of the posters have been verified so I am not concerned that the posts are not valid. Many have expressed that one of their greatest fears now is that the hospital will be attacked by a deranged family member of a covid19 patient - they are routinely being called murderers when patients die, by family that don’t believe in covid19, or believe the vaccines are a conspiracy to kill them, or believe that doctors are willfully refusing the miracle cures of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, et al. so the body count will grow and the 5G conspiracy can proceed.

If you people don’t grasp that this is real, YOU ARE NOT PAYING ATTENTION to the insanity that is taking hold in America. IT IS REAL.

Tuesday afternoon a medical staffer at my local hospital went outside to stand in the sun during her break - a very common occurrence at our little local hospital where I was born. Someone walked up behind her, pulled her ponytail hard and punched her several times then walked off. She got a photo of them in retreat and the attacker was later apprehended. When the staffer went inside to the ER to relate her experience, it was determined that she had been stabbed several times, not punched. Stabbed in the neck and shoulders. Luckily the wounds missed the critical structures and she will be okay - but anyone with any understanding of human anatomy knows that even shallow stab wounds to the neck area could be paralyzing or fatal.

Maybe the person is just crazy. But maybe they are cult crazy and have bought into this new line of thinking that the doctors and nurses are ALL part of the plandemic conspiracy.

I just can’t abide attacks on our medical people right now, sorry not sorry.

[Burning Petard]

BSG, are you really surprised. Remember, most of the people who declare they do not trust the government then went out and voted for the most untrustworthy person in America.

snailgate

[Burning Petard]

BSG, are you really surprised. Remember, most of the people who declare they do not trust the government then went out and voted for the most untrustworthy person in America.

snailgate

[BoSoxGal]

Texas father of TWELVE, 49, dies of COVID


His family declined to say whether or not he had been vaccinated against COVID.

'The hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life was to come home and tell my babies that their daddy wasn’t coming home,' Gina Hickson, Reed's wife of 29 years, told the station through sobs.

As Reed's condition deteriorated, Gina took to social media, begging friends and strangers alike to help her find a bed for her husband in a hospital equipped with an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine.

The ECMO machine provides life support by taking on the functions of a patient's heart and lungs: it drains the blood from the veins, adds the oxygen and removes the carbon dioxide, warms the blood and then pumps the blood through the body.

There has been a severe shortage of ECMO machines and technicians qualified to operate them during the pandemic.

Dr. Andy Wilson, a friend of Reed's, said he and others were reaching out to hospitals as far away as Arizona, Oklahoma and Florida to try and secure an ECMO machine for the dying patient, but to no avail.

He eventually ended up in the ICU

On September 19, Gina took to Facebook, asking for help with find a hospital bed for Reed with a high-level life support machine called ECMO

According to the widow, her husband contracted COVID, along with the rest of the family, in August.

While the wife and children had a mild form of the illness, so much so that they initially did not even think it was COVID, the husband was soon hospitalized with breathing problems.

After undergoing a 10-day treatment, the dad-of-12 was released home to continue his recovery.

'He got home he was doing great again,' Gina recounted. 'He was outside getting sun, feeling much better.'

But Reed was not out of the woods: within 20 days of testing positive for COVID, he would be hospitalized twice more, eventually ending up in the ICU.

'I found myself having to face the harsh reality that putting Reed on a ventilator was his only chance to stay alive,' his wife wrote in a Facebook post last week.

'He fought and fought and fought and pleaded and begged to stay here with his family, I saw it, I watched it every day for a month straight,' said Gina.

Reed Hickson leaves behind his wife and their 12 children: Cayla, Mason, Leiah, Connor, Reece, Lily, Morgan, Lance, Chase, Hensley, Casen, and Ryker.

Wilson has launched a campaign to help with his late friend's medical bills and funeral expenses.

'We are all so incredibly heartbroken, and the void this family is experiencing is beyond description,' he wrote.

As of September 21, just over 50 percent of Texas' 29.1 million people have been fully vaccinated.

The state's rate of COVID transmission is 386 cases per 100,000 people.

Does anybody really think he was vaccinated and the family just didn’t want to say that?

TWELVE CHILDREN! Who will support them now? The TAXPAYERS.

I am full of fury at these selfish parents rolling the dice with their lives when they have children to support and nurture. Unconscionable.

[BoSoxGal]

Insanity in Canada too:

Man punches nurse in the face multiple times after his wife is vaccinated for Covid

(CNN) — Police are looking for a man in Canada they say punched a nurse in the face multiple times, knocking her to the ground after she administered a Covid-19 vaccine to his wife without his permission.

On Monday, around 9:15 a.m., a man walked into a Brunet Pharmacy in Sherbrooke, a city in southern Quebec, and accused a nurse in her 40s, who police have not named, of vaccinating his wife, Sherbrooke Police spokesman Martin Carrier told CNN.

"Right at the beginning, the suspect was very angry, very aggressive, he asked the nurse why she vaccinated his wife without approval, without his consent," Carrier said. "And he punched her right in the face multiple times so the nurse didn't have the time to defend or explain herself ... and she fell to the ground and the suspect left running out of the drugstore."

There are no laws in Canada that say individuals need their spouses' permission to get vaccinated, and it is unclear if his wife had given consent.

The nurse was taken to a nearby hospital by ambulance where she was treated for the "multiple injuries to the face" he said.

As a result of the incident, the pharmacy told CNN partner, CBC, that they suspended vaccinations. CNN reached out to the pharmacy but they refused to comment on whether or not vaccinations were being administered Thursday.

Brunet Pharmacy's parent company, The Jean Coutu Group Inc., also declined to comment but told CNN they "fully condemn this act which is unacceptable towards the pharmacy teams who have been providing essential services since the beginning of the pandemic."

Canada has vaccinated 69.8% of its population, surpassing the US by 15.6%, according to data from Our World in Data, seen in CNN's vaccine tracker.

Although most Canadians have welcomed public health measures and the country has one of the highest vaccination rates worldwide, case counts and hospitalizations are on the rise, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada, especially among younger, unvaccinated Canadians.

Police do not have a name or photo of the suspect or security footage of the incident, Carrier said. They do however have a description of the man and are hoping with the public's help, they'll be able to identify him and charge him with assault.

The suspect is described as, 30 to 45-year-old-man, 6-feet tall, medium build with darker skin, short brown hair, thick eyebrows, two small ear piercings on each ear and a tattoo on his hand that appeared to be in the shape of a cross, Carrier said.

[Econoline]

[ex-khobar Andy]

Sadly this is not a real funeral home but I think it's an effective ad none the less. I looked it up with the thought - I'll need one of those funeral homes one of these days and if they are close by I might see what I can do to send some business their way.

[BoSoxGal]

From the LA Times last month:

Op-Ed: On the front lines, here’s what the seven stages of severe COVID-19 look like

By Karen Gallardo
Aug. 26, 2021 3:01 AM PT

I’m a respiratory therapist. With the fourth wave of the pandemic in full swing, fueled by the highly contagious Delta variant, the trajectory of the patients I see, from admission to critical care, is all too familiar. When they’re vaccinated, their COVID-19 infections most likely end after Stage 1. If only that were the case for everyone.

Get vaccinated. If you choose not to, here’s what to expect if you are hospitalized for a serious case of COVID-19.

Stage 1. You’ve had debilitating symptoms for a few days, but now it is so hard to breathe that you come to the emergency room. Your oxygen saturation level tells us you need help, a supplemental flow of 1 to 4 liters of oxygen per minute. We admit you and start you on antivirals, steroids, anticoagulants or monoclonal antibodies. You’ll spend several days in the hospital feeling run-down, but if we can wean you off the oxygen, you’ll get discharged. You survive.

Stage 2. It becomes harder and harder for you to breathe. “Like drowning,” many patients describe the feeling. The bronchodilator treatments we give you provide little relief. Your oxygen requirements increase significantly, from 4 liters to 15 liters to 40 liters per minute. Little things, like relieving yourself or sitting up in bed, become too difficult for you to do on your own. Your oxygen saturation rapidly declines when you move about. We transfer you to the intensive care unit.

Stage 3. You’re exhausted from hyperventilating to satisfy your body’s demand for air. We put you on noninvasive, “positive pressure” ventilation — a big, bulky face mask that must be Velcro’d tightly around your face so the machine can efficiently push pressure into your lungs to pop them open so you get enough of the oxygen it delivers.

Stage 4. Your breathing becomes even more labored. We can tell you’re severely fatigued. An arterial blood draw confirms that the oxygen content in your blood is critically low. We prepare to intubate you. If you’re able to and if there’s time, we will suggest that you call your loved ones. This might be the last time they’ll hear your voice.

We connect you to a ventilator. You are sedated and paralyzed, fed through a feeding tube, hooked to a Foley catheter and a rectal tube. We turn your limp body regularly, so you don’t develop pressure ulcers — bed sores. We bathe you and keep you clean. We flip you onto your stomach to allow for better oxygenation. We will try experimental therapeutics.

Stage 5. Some patients survive Stage 4. Unfortunately, your oxygen levels and overall condition have not improved after several days on the ventilator. Your COVID-infested lungs need assistance and time to heal, something that an ECMO machine, which bypasses your lungs and oxygenates your blood, can provide. But alas, our community hospital doesn’t have that capability.

If you’re stable enough, you will get transferred to another hospital for that therapy. Otherwise, we’ll continue treating you as best we can. We’re understaffed and overwhelmed, but we’ll always give you the best care we can.

Stage 6. The pressure required to open your lungs is so high that air can leak into your chest cavity, so we insert tubes to clear it out. Your kidneys fail to filter the byproducts from the drugs we continuously give you. Despite diuretics, your entire body swells from fluid retention, and you require dialysis to help with your renal function.

The long hospital stay and your depressed immune system make you susceptible to infections. A chest X-ray shows fluid accumulating in your lung sacs. A blood clot may show up, too. We can’t prevent these complications at this point; we treat them as they present.

If your blood pressure drops critically, we will administer vasopressors to bring it up, but your heart may stop anyway. After several rounds of CPR, we’ll get your pulse and circulation back. But soon, your family will need to make a difficult decision.

Stage 7: After several meetings with the palliative care team, your family decides to withdraw care. We extubate you, turning off the breathing machinery. We set up a final FaceTime call with your loved ones. As we work in your room, we hear crying and loving goodbyes. We cry, too, and we hold your hand until your last natural breath.

I’ve been at this for 17 months now. It doesn’t get easier. My pandemic stories rarely end well.

Karen Gallardo is a respiratory therapist at Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura.

[BoSoxGal]

Doctor who lost over 100 patients to COVID says some deny virus from their death beds

One patient demanded a different doctor, saying "I don't believe you."

September 25, 2021 | 12:47 PM

Matthew Trunsky’s post detailing his interactions with eight covid patients highlights the resistance and mistreatment some health-care workers face while caring for patients who have put off or declined getting the vaccine. Liz Debeliso / Beaumont Health

By Andrea Salcedo, Washington Post

Matthew Trunsky is used to people being angry at him.

As a pulmonologist and director of the palliative care unit at a Beaumont Health hospital in southeastern Michigan, Trunsky sees some of the facility’s sickest patients and is often the bearer of bad news.

He gets it. No one is prepared to hear their loved one is dying.

But when a well-regarded intensive care unit nurse told him during a recent shift that the wife of an unvaccinated COVID patient had berated her when she informed the woman of her husband’s deteriorating condition, Trunsky, who has lost more than 100 patients to the coronavirus, reached his breaking point.

When he got home that evening, he made himself a sandwich and opened Facebook.

Still sporting his black scrubs, he began to vent. He wrote about a critically ill patient who disputed his COVID-19 diagnosis. Another threatened to call his lawyer if he wasn’t given ivermectin, an anti-parasite drug that is not approved for treating COVID. A third, Trunsky wrote, told the doctor they would rather die than take one of the vaccines.

One demanded a different doctor, “I don’t believe you,” he told the physician.

The physician added: “Of course the answer was to have been vaccinated — but they were not and now they’re angry at the medical community for their failure.”

Trunsky’s post detailing his interactions with eight COVID patients and their relatives highlights the resistance and mistreatment some health care workers across the U.S. face while caring for patients who have put off or declined getting vaccinated. Trunsky estimates that nine out of every 10 COVID patients he treats are unvaccinated.

His post — a plea for people to get vaccinated — also reveals the physical and emotional toll the pandemic has had on health care workers, who have been on the front lines for over a year and a half. Roughly 3 out of 10 have considered leaving the profession, according to a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll, and about 6 in 10 say stress from the pandemic has harmed their mental health.

Some doctors are refusing to treat unvaccinated patients. Last month, an Alabama physician posed beside a sign announcing he would not treat any unvaccinated patients as of Oct. 1. Earlier this month, a Florida doctor sent a letter to her patients informing them that she would not be treating any unvaccinated patients in person after Sept. 15.

Trunsky, 55, empathizes with other burned-out medical workers.

“We are physically tired as a whole, me included, and we are emotionally exhausted . . . I don’t think a week goes by that I don’t see someone pass away,” he told The Post.

Early into the pandemic, Trunsky spent about four hours a day calling patients’ families to update them on their loved ones’ status. Some of those conversations still affect him, like the time he called a woman to share the news that her father had died. “I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now‚” he recalled her telling him. “We’re burying my mother.”

Another time, when calling a woman to report her brother was dying, the woman — before Trunsky said anything — answered with, “Look, my mother died, my father died, my brother died and I don’t want any bad news.”

But what makes him sadder, he told The Post, “are the ones I don’t remember.” He has lost too many patients during the global pandemic to recall them all.

Throughout most of 2020, Trunsky and his staff faced surge after surge of coronavirus patients. So when the Food and Drug Administration authorized the first vaccine last December, Trunsky said morale and hope were restored at his hospital. That did not last long, though. As vaccination rates plateaued and the highly contagious delta variant began to spread, hospital beds began filling back up.

Trunsky said patients he sees give different reasons for not taking one of the vaccines. Some, he said, regret the decision — like a nursing mother who said she was concerned about how a vaccine might affect her newborn baby. Others, Trunsky said, remain convinced they made the right choice — even on their death beds.

Whatever their reasons, he told The Post, “they are paying the price, and they are getting mad at us.”

And while he said it is easier to deal with appreciative patients than those threatening to sue if he will not give them ivermectin, he remains committed to treating anyone battling COVID with the same level of care.

As for those he wrote about in his Facebook post after the tough shift earlier this month, six out of the eight have since died, he said.

Two, including the husband of the woman who berated the ICU nurse, remain in critical condition.

[MGMcAnick]

From the LA Times last month:

Stage 1. You’ve had debilitating symptoms for a few days, but now it is so hard to breathe that you come to the emergency room. Your oxygen saturation level tells us you need help, a supplemental flow of 1 to 4 liters of oxygen per minute. We admit you and start you on antivirals, steroids, anticoagulants or monoclonal antibodies. You’ll spend several days in the hospital feeling run-down, but if we can wean you off the oxygen, you’ll get discharged. You survive.

Stage 2. It becomes harder and harder for you to breathe. “Like drowning,” many patients describe the feeling. The bronchodilator treatments we give you provide little relief. Your oxygen requirements increase significantly, from 4 liters to 15 liters to 40 liters per minute. Little things, like relieving yourself or sitting up in bed, become too difficult for you to do on your own. Your oxygen saturation rapidly declines when you move about. We transfer you to the intensive care unit.

Stage 3. You’re exhausted from hyperventilating to satisfy your body’s demand for air. We put you on noninvasive, “positive pressure” ventilation — a big, bulky face mask that must be Velcro’d tightly around your face so the machine can efficiently push pressure into your lungs to pop them open so you get enough of the oxygen it delivers.

Before vaccinations were available, I spent 13 days in the hospital with covid. I posted several times during that period. Some may remember that. I do. I don't know if I truly reached Stage 3, but I do remember that I spent three days in the ICU and had the Bi-Pap that she explains above during those nights. I was sedated to sleep, but conscious and breathing on my own, with oxygen, during the days.

One of the very scary things about being in the hospital with covid is that it can turn on a patient so quickly that one can be breathing on their own one minute, intubated twenty minutes later, and dead in an hour. No one told me about that until some time after I was discharged. My BSRN daughter in law did. She still spends some of her nursing duties in a covid unit. She has tried to get out of it, but they keep dragging her back. She has seen more people die in the last year and a half than most nurses used to see in a career.

I don't know how those nurses do it. I sent a thank you letter to the covid unit nurses after they got tired of looking at me, and booted me out. I was told recently that it is still on their bulletin board. I guess not enough survivors do that.

I have had two Pfizer jabs, and when I hit the correct period after my last one, I will go back for a third.

[BoSoxGal]

Pfizer booster scheduled for Monday evening after work. I’ll only have a day to recover but I’m hoping the booster side effects won’t be so harsh.

[MGMcAnick]

Pfizer booster scheduled for Monday evening after work. I’ll only have a day to recover but I’m hoping the booster side effects won’t be so harsh.

Please let us know what, if any, side effects you experience. I think the effects each earlier shot had on me were less than some other folks had as I already had antibodies from having had covid.

[BoSoxGal]

Pfizer booster scheduled for Monday evening after work. I’ll only have a day to recover but I’m hoping the booster side effects won’t be so harsh.

Please let us know what, if any, side effects you experience. I think the effects each earlier shot had on me were less than some other folks had as I already had antibodies from having had covid.

Got the booster at 5:45pm yesterday after work. Talked with the RN who administered it and shared my hope that side effects would not be so bad since I’d had it before - she suggested most likely my body would react the same as it had before.

By 9:30 I was very fatigued and starting to feel a slight headache, but I held off on analgesic so as not to blunt the vaccine response. Woke up this morning feeling like I got Tony Sopranoed (I’m rewatching The Sopranos in anticipation of next months release of The Many Saints of Newark).

Headache, swollen lymph nodes in my neck, body aches all over (except surprisingly the site of injection isn’t as sore this time). Had to take an analgesic this morning, can’t make it 24 hours it was just too much.

I got up and dressed and brushed my choppers so as to hopefully feel less sick today - I find staying in bed or pjs all day tends to add a psychological dimension to feeling like crap. I am just about to embark on cutting up and browning chicken for my spicy butter chicken, to which I will add a little extra cayenne, cumin and turmeric today to boost my immune system along with the jab.

I have been making a curry or curried chicken salad at least once a week for the last few months and I am feeling a lot of relief from inflammatory pain (arthritis), so I definitely recommend that approach for folks who want to try a natural method for treating some of the pain of aging.

[Sue U]

I have been making a curry or curried chicken salad at least once a week for the last few months and I am feeling a lot of relief from inflammatory pain (arthritis), so I definitely recommend that approach for folks who want to try a natural method for treating some of the pain of aging.

Did not know arthritis could be delicious. I don't have it yet, but I am willing to eat all the curry just the same. Strictly as a preventative, of course.

[Guinevere]

I take a daily supplement of combined glucosamine, chondroitin, and turmeric, to help ease my knee pain, but getting the turmeric in food is much more fun!

[MGMcAnick]

Other than the curry chicken, that doesn't sound very encouraging. I think I'll try to get my booster on a Saturday. I'll be eligible for a booster about the middle of October.

[BoSoxGal]

Make the unvaccinated pay their own way

By Charles Silver and David A. Hyman
New York Daily News

Sep 29, 2021 at 5:00 AM

Robby Walker is lucky to be alive. After the unvaccinated, 52-year-old father from Florida contracted COVID-19-related pneumonia, a ventilator wasn’t enough. He needed Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO), a treatment in which blood is routed through a machine that purifies and oxygenates it, giving the patient’s lungs a chance to recover. But no ECMO machines were available in Florida or nearby states because other COVID patients were using them. Walker’s family reportedly contacted 169 hospitals looking for one without success.

Fortunately, a doctor in Connecticut learned of Walker’s plight and arranged for him to be treated there. After a 1,200-mile flight on an air ambulance, Walker received ECMO for 22 days and survived.

Three million dollars is a reasonable estimate of the cost of Walker’s illness. That includes $2.5 million for ECMO which costs about $825,000 a week; $125,000 for the air ambulance, charges for which typically exceed $100 per mile; $30,000 for time on a ventilator; and another $300,000 in lost wages, physical therapy costs and other incidentals.

If Walker had been vaccinated, the cost of protecting him would have been about $40, and he would not have had to pay anything out of pocket because the government pays for the shots..

In racking up sizeable COVID-related bills, Walker has many unvaccinated companions who are filling all available hospital beds, demanding expensive monoclonal antibodies, and overwhelming health care workers. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, preventable hospitalizations involving unvaccinated adults generated almost $6 billion in costs in the last three months. Spending is also rising fast, up from $0.6 billion in June to $3.7 billion in August.

Unvaccinated people paid a small fraction of these charges with their own money. Public and private insurers picked up the rest. This poses a question: Why are unvaccinated people who fall ill able to spend billions of dollars of other people’s money? Even if one believes, as we do, that the decision to be inoculated is a personal one, shouldn’t people bear the predictable consequences of their actions? An obvious effect of being unvaccinated is a materially higher probability of contracting COVID and needing expensive care — for which, we posit, the unvaccinated alone should pay. To think otherwise is to believe that our society should subsidize the decision to remain unprotected. It makes no sense to do that.

If unvaccinated people cannot afford needed treatments, they won’t be denied medical assistance, but the resulting bills will force some into bankruptcy. That happens when people (and businesses) take risks unwisely and incur debts they cannot repay.

We see no reason to treat the unvaccinated differently. If the government should not mandate inoculations, it should also refrain from using tax dollars to protect people from the financial consequences of foregoing them. Whether other people, like smokers who suffer lung cancer, should also have to pay their own way is plausible but must be considered on their own merits. The COVID crisis warrants measures we may or may not want to impose in other situations.

We do not know whether fear of insolvency would increase vaccination uptake. Many unvaccinated people suffer from what’s known as optimism bias. They think they are less likely than others to get COVID or experience severe symptoms. Piling adverse financial consequences on top of the prospect of becoming seriously sick or dying may not change their minds.

But there are reasons to hope direct financial responsibility for the costs of hospitalization and treatment will matter. Some people worry more about their finances than their health, especially those who’ve had money problems before or support dependents.

Peer pressure also matters. When Facebook groups circulate reports of unvaccinated people who lost their homes, savings and children’s college funds, inoculation may be seen as the sensible course.

We would not deny vaccinated people who suffer breakthrough COVID infections the security of the social safety net. Nor would we penalize children or the few people with conditions that preclude them from being inoculated. But we would not exempt persons who forego vaccinations for religious or other conscientious reasons from financial accountability. They might spread their risks by forming pools of like-minded individuals, but they have no claim to support from vaccinated people who do not share their views.

Initially, the consequences of the COVID epidemic were beyond anyone’s control. But now that effective vaccines are available, the calamity is of our own making. Hospitals are again overwhelmed and people, nearly all of whom are unvaccinated, are again getting sick and dying in droves. It is time to stop subsidizing bad behavior.

Silver and Hyman are adjunct fellows at the Cato Institute, the co-authors of “Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much For Health Care,” and law professors at the University of Texas and Georgetown University, respectively.

[ex-khobar Andy]

An interesting piece, BSG. Of course the obvious counter argument is the smokers / lung cancer or sky divers / ground impact one, and it's difficult to oppose that. There is a plausible argument that smoking actually saves health care dollars because the smokers die younger and accumulate less geriatric healthcare expenditure; and that same theory might lead a society to think that sky diving and SCUBA and spelunking should be encouraged, along with a high salt high fat super processed food diet.

It's interesting that a Venn diagram of anti vaxxers and extreme 'take responsibility for your own actions' folk might show a very high level of coincidence.

[BoSoxGal]

It's interesting that a Venn diagram of anti vaxxers and extreme 'take responsibility for your own actions' folk might show a very high level of coincidence.

I’ve been thinking about that a great deal in recent weeks, especially each time I read about vaccine refusers who died and orphaned their minor children, a great many of whom will now be supported at least in part by social security survivors benefits, if not also SSI, food stamps, etc. Because children can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps and shouldn’t be penalized for the poor choices or bad life outcomes of their parents - though I’m betting many of these unvaccinated covid19 victim parents weren’t the sort in life to have embraced societal support of the children of people who qualify for welfare, etc.

[BoSoxGal]

I believe some private insurers do charge a premium penalty to smokers, which I don’t argue with. They should probably charge the same kind of premium penalty to folks with high BMIs - but only while offering subsidized and meaningful access to smoking cessation programs and fitness programs/dietician programs.

I don’t doubt that smokers actually lower the costs of healthcare to society overall - in my own family smoking took my maternal grandfather, paternal grandfather, maternal uncle and my mother at very early ages relatively speaking - early 50s, mid 60s, early 70s. They paid into SS for decades and collected for a few years only, if at all. They died of widow maker heart attacks, cancer and COPD without spending much time at all hospitalized and none in long term nursing care.

The majority of folks who are healthy enough to make it into late 80s early 90s and beyond end up running up a very significant fraction of yearly healthcare expenditures- however, the root of that problem lies in our society’s struggle to accept death as part of life and insistence on inflicting extensive invasive medical treatment on the very elderly who should just be allowed to die peacefully in their recliner or bed at home/hospice rather than being hospitalized and subject to every medical intervention available. The cultural shift required to overcome that problem seems insurmountable.