Will Your Health or Life Insurance Rates Go up If You Don’t Get the Vaccine?
When you hear that Delta charges unvaccinated employees $ 200 a month to enroll in the company’s health plan, you may wonder if your vaccination status will affect your insurance rates. It’s (unsurprisingly) difficult, but so far, employers and health and life insurance companies have been reluctant to raise premiums based on vaccination status, although this could change if the pandemic worsens.
Will health insurance premiums increase for unvaccinated individuals?
Federal law prohibits employers and insurers from charging higher prices to people with pre-existing health risks (if you are a smoker – the exception). However, according to Time , there is an exception in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) that allows employers to use fines as part of a workplace wellness program, and that is how $ 200 will be charged to unvaccinated Delta workers.
However, this is uncharacteristic. Most companies take the simpler route to encourage vaccination: the requirement that “all employees must be vaccinated,” whereby an employee can be fired for non-compliance. The company has the legal right to do this, although they cannot fire workers who refuse this vaccine for religious reasons or for reasons related to disability ( see this Lifehacker post for more on how this works).
In the case of Delta, they cited a “work culture” as a reason why they do not impose a vaccination mandate on their employees, so instead they do it by paying for medical services. Delta is a special case, however, with most employers encouraging vaccinations as prescribed.
What about life insurance?
According to Fortune , most insurers do not take a person’s vaccination status into account when underwriting new applicants or existing life insurance policies. However, there are exceptions – several companies request vaccination status of the applicant in “select cases” when the applicant has increased risk factors associated with comorbidity.
Currently, you may be asked about the vaccine status for a life insurance policy, but this does not necessarily mean that this status will be used to calculate your premiums. Why is that? As insurance agent Chris Huntley explained to Yahoo :
“My guess is that they think this is a short-term problem and not a fatality factor big enough to change their insurance claim [processes] or prices.” Huntley also believes the COVID-19 vaccination is made up of “dozens of variables that [insurers] can influence their pricing, but don’t.”
However, that could change if the pandemic gets worse, as suggested by Ian Graeber of the American Council of Life Insurers in an interview with Fortune : “There may be short- and long-term considerations based on experiences with COVID, new strains, vaccines and consumer behavior.”