TLDR: the multicausal situation causing excess deaths is also causing “excess” health care costs. I’m convinced that my job’s health care costs are one anecdote of this trend.
I work in finance, and part of that job is doing the budgeting and expense/revenue tracking for a mid-sized employer. Now, this is just one data point, but when people say the vaxxed are ill and dying off, I would proffer my experience on top of the other data. I won’t give specifics, naturally, but here’s a short summary.
My employer is such that we are self-insured. That is to say our revenues cover the health care costs of the employees, with the employees kicking in a bit. We are fairly generous with the health care benefit plans, with low co-pays. Starting in 2022 and accelerating in 2023, we are experiencing a huge increase in the actual expenses for our benefit costs. We have less than 1,000 employees, most of whom are young to late middle age at most. Only a few Boomer oldsters in corner offices.
Given that we have a younger working population, we usually have 1-2% of our employees/families be high casualty claimants (cancer, premature babies, etc.). In the last two years, that’s jumped to about 5%. That may not sound like much, but in hypothetical numbers we’ve gone from 1-2 cancer cases to 3-4 and with some other serious issues, and that’s expensive. Again, in hypothetical but comparable numbers, if our budget was $1,000 year , we are at $1,200 per year. If it’s an outlier, then it’s gone on for 1-1/2 years, which makes it not an outlier anymore, but a trend.
I told the boss to budget 5% for medical inflation for 2023, and that still wasn’t enough. I new it at the time, but that was the best I could get out of the corner office Boomer. Said Boomer, triple vaxxed himself, thought that the pandemic is over and costs will go back to normal. Side note, working for boomers is both good and bad. They are way less backstabby and will look after those that report to them, but well, new ideas are sometimes difficult to convince them of.
Medical inflation is always higher than core inflation, if you watch this chart in the future, you’re going to find an increased divergence.