Unlike Denmark’s health care system, which guarantees free health care to everyone in most cases, our health care system is unaffordable and does not work well for tens of millions of Americans. It costs too much. It denies and delays and otherwise restricts access to care. For that reason alone, adopting Danish vaccine rules, as Secretary of HHS, RFK Jr. has just done, could have grave consequences for the public health, reports Amelia Neirenberg and Maya Tekeli for The New York Times.
The Danish can reliably ensure that women and children will get the treatments they need. In the US, more than 70 million people are uninsured or underinsured, causing people to forgo or delay medical care and compromising people’s health. In a recent Gallup poll, 30 percent of participants reported that they or a family member skipped treatment in the last year because of the cost.
Vaccines become all the more important when people don’t have free access to medical care. Diseases can spread quickly. Countless lives could be lost needlessly. In the last year alone, several states witnessed large measles outbreaks as a result of the government’s failure to recommend the measles vaccine. And, so far, three people have died.
The government’s adoption of Danish protocols means that children in the US will get six fewer vaccines, 11 instead of 17. To improve the public health in the US, our government could adopt Denmark’s guaranteed universal health care system or its negotiated drug pricing system. Or, it could look to Germany and Japan as models for our health care system. But, RFK Jr. is focusing exclusively on cutting vaccines.
Different countries approach vaccines differently largely because they have different populations and different health care systems. So, if you’re looking for “best vaccine practices,” experts explain that you can’t pick and choose selectively from another country without considering these factors.
Moreover, US experts say that, until now, our vaccine policy has been aligned with other comparable countries, including Germany, Canada, Britain and Australia. Denmark is an outlier when it comes to vaccines.
Note: Medicare covers a range of vaccines for older adults and people with disabilities, including the shingles vaccine, the COVID vaccine and the flu vaccine. Get the preventive care you need.
Here’s more from Just Care:
- John Oliver: RFK Jr., a danger to our public health
- Get the preventive care you need: Medicare pays for it
- RFK Jr. fires every expert on CDC committee that approves vaccines
- Can RFK Jr. limit harmful chemical additives in our food supply?
- Medicare will cover weight-loss drugs in 2027
