1000 people per day are dying of COVID. Each one costs the health care system $500,000 to $1 million dollars to treat. Half of that expense comes from the US Federal Government, in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, VA, basic research and logistics, and support to hospitals.
The daily cost to the government, and let’s estimate the low end here, is $500,000 X 1000 x .5. (This is only for COVID deaths, not those treated “successfully” who only end up with Long Covid. Let’s just make this a low ball estimate.)The total cost each day for each COVID death, therefore, at a minimum, to the taxpayers, is 2,500,000,000. 2.5 Billion dollars.
Let us assume that only half of those vaccinated would need to be hospitalized, and only 10 percent of the current number would die. A wild overestimate, but just for the purposes of a rough cost-benefit analysis.
The only catch is that we would need to incentivize, with cash bounty, the remainder of the unvaccinated. That would lower daily deaths, eventually, within a few weeks, to 1000 X.5 x.1 or about 50 deaths per day. The cost to the US Treasury would go from 2.5 Billion dollars a day, just for deaths, mind you, to 25 million dollars. That is a savings of.. 2.25 Billion dollars a day. There are more savings from people not to get treated for Long Covid or Long Treatment who don’t die. It’s still a choice. People are free to go Unvaccinated. Fine. We only need 90 percent vaccination rate to get near to flattening this newest wave.
If we can afford to treat these people after they get sick, we can afford to pay them the amount of the savings NOT to get sick. This would be in the range of 1500.00 for the first shot, 2500.00 for the second shot, and 3500 for the booster shot. The total on that would be...for half the unvaccinated population, (50 million let’s say, X 7500 dollars).. (My calculator does not go this high...) is about 750 billion dollars.
It’s time for us to save taxpayers’ money by paying a bounty for the Unvaccinated with an increasing scale of COVID vaccine for each shot. For the rest of us, just give us a tax break if we’ve already had the shot.
Expensive? Yes. But the cost of NOT doing it is astronomically expensive. Even if this were NOT cost effective, we have an interest in doing it. The fact that it is both in our interest AND cost effective makes it a no brainer.
This is all back of the envelope figuring. People with better calculators should recalculate for better estimates, but sometimes, when the difference in cost and benefit is so large, even a back of the envelope scratch attempt is all you need to prove the point. I welcome corrections and revisions.