WELFARE KINGS:

As hospitals and health officials prepare for Omicron, additional research is being performed analyzing earlier stages of the pandemic.

During the Delta surge that began over the summer, there were about 690,000 preventable Covid-19 hospitalizations in the United States that cost nearly $14 billion dollars, according to new estimates from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

About 1.2 million hospital admissions were recorded between June and November 2021, according to data from the US Department of Health and Human Services. For their analysis, KFF used data from the CDC to estimate that 85% of those hospitalizations were among unvaccinated.

Hospitalizations for which Covid-19 was not the primary cause were excluded, as well as those that could not have been prevented by vaccines as they are not 100% effective.

Using various studies, KFF estimated the average hospitalization to cost about $20,000 and preventable Covid-19 hospitalizations totaling $13.8 billion dollars over the course of six months.

"The monetary cost of treating unvaccinated people for Covid-19 is borne not only by patients but also by society more broadly, including taxpayer-funded public programs and private insurance premiums paid by workers, businesses, and individual purchasers," the analysts wrote.

"Though there was of course a societal cost to develop and distribute vaccinations, the vaccines save the US health system money in the longer run by preventing costly hospitalizations."

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