Employees Should Pay Under New Vaccine Rule

WASHINGTON - Nov. 4, 2021 - PRLog -- The new federal rule mandating large companies to require workers to be vaccinated or undergo weekly testing permits employers to have the unvaccinated pay for their own Covid tests, and they should to be fair and to make the requirement effective, argues public interest law professor John Banzhaf.

Requiring those who refuse to be vaccinated to pay the huge costs of their refusal is only fair, and will save many lives - as such a policy did when some of the costs of smoking were imposed on smokers - says Banzhaf, who started and then lead the nonsmokers' rights movement, and helped make smokers bear more of the costs they imposed on others.

This can and should occur in many ways, he suggests.

First, in situations where employees are required to be vaccinated or face periodic testing for COVID, it seems only fair that those who need the test should pay the costs of their own periodic testing.  Otherwise these few holdouts are forcing others not only to bear the risks of becoming infected with COVID, but also to pay these costs of testing.

While federal law requires insurers to cover the testing costs when ordered by a health care provider, routine workplace tests are exempt from that provision.

Second, at the growing number of universities where students must be vaccinated or have periodic testing, those who stubbornly decline to be vaccinated should pay at least the huge costs of the tests their refusal imposes on others.

As the Wall Street Journal has reported, "some schools are passing the approximately $50 cost of a surveillance test onto unvaccinated students."

Banzhaf notes that while some states have prohibited colleges from requiring students to be vaccinated, it's not clear that such restrictions would legally prevent a college from simply having two different tuition or health insurance rates: one for those who have been vaccinated, and a different higher rate for students who simply refuse to be vaccinated.

Noted medical ethicist Arthur Caplan agrees.  In an article entitled People Who Refuse COVID-19 Vaccination Should Be Held Financially Liable, he writes: "the unvaccinated in the United States are imposing costs and harms on the rest of us. They are, as they incessantly point out, free to choose not to vaccinate. But they should pay for their poor choices that hurt others."

Banzhaf adds that while they may be free to refuse to be vaccinated, we the vaccinated are then both free and justified in asking them to pay the costs their so-called "freedom to choose" is imposing on others.

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