Whooping cough, also known as pertussis, has wreaked enough havoc in California for the state to declare an epidemic last Wednesday, and has some doctors more concerned than ever about their expenses. Doctors in rural areas are particularly affected by the high cost of vaccines for the illness.
The cost of supplying a single whooping cough vaccination to a small child can often cost $450 for a doctor. This expense is what the doctor must cover after the amount that most insurance companies tend to offer for covering the cost of vaccinations.
Insurance companies typically treat vaccinations differently than other procedures at a doctor’s office because of the preventative nature of the medicine. From their standpoint, the probability of a patient actually catching whooping cough, or any disease for that matter, is just that – a probability, not a certainty. Insurers do not cover the full price of vaccines because they cannot be sure that the patient would have been affected by the disease had they not received the vaccination.
Ironically, uninsured children in California are far easier for a doctor to vaccinate for whooping cough because the full cost of these treatments is covered by the federal Vaccines for Children Program, which is sometimes referred to as Medi-Cal.
The rising costs that doctors have to pay for vaccines, as well as various insurance companies’ tendency to delay their reimbursements, are endangering the ability for small town doctors to provide vaccines to children at a manageable rate for parents. If the trend keeps up, Californians in rural areas could have to start looking to the city for their whooping cough vaccinations.
