Delta Is Raising Health Insurance Premiums For Unvaccinated Employees
Delta Air Lines is increasing the health insurance premiums for unvaccinated employees
Delta Air Lines proved today that they are the bad bitches of the air. The airline company just announced that all unvaccinated employees will have to pay higher health insurance premiums moving forward, citing the exorbitant cost to cover employees who are hospitalized with a preventable virus.
Being subjected to weekly testing and mask-wearing wasn’t enough to convince people to get the jab. Hell, not dying from COVID-19 apparently wasn’t enough to convince people to get vaccinated. So Delta Air Lines is going to have to hit their employees where it actually hurts, their pocketbooks.
CNBC reports that Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian told employees that they will face $200 monthly increases on their health insurance premiums starting November 1, 2021, if they aren’t vaccinated.
Bastian cites the steep costs to cover employees who are hospitalized with the virus as the reasoning behind the price hike. Unvaccinated employees will also have to wear masks in all indoor spaces effective immediately (currently all employees and customers, regardless of vax status, have to wear masks on flights) and take weekly COVID-19 tests starting September 12, 2021.
The most sobering statistic from the airline company is that every single Delta employee who has been hospitalized with COVID-19 has been unvaccinated.
“The average hospital stay for COVID-19 has cost Delta $50,000 per person,” Bastian said in an employee memo (via CNBC). “This surcharge will be necessary to address the financial risk the decision to not vaccinate is creating for our company. In recent weeks since the rise of the B.1.617.2 variant, all Delta employees who have been hospitalized with COVID-19 were not fully vaccinated.”
Delta will also stop providing “COVID pay protection” to unvaccinated employees who contract COVID-19. Unvaccinated individuals who get sick must use their “sick days” if they need paid time off, whereas vaccinated employees who get a breakthrough COVID-19 infection WILL still be able to access the company’s COVID pay protection.
Moving forward, Delta is only hiring vaccinated people.
Delta Air Lines previously announced that they will not hire a new person if they are unvaccinated, but they are not mandating vaccines for current employees, they’re just making it super inconvenient for them to continue working with the company.
The Delta CEO stated that 75% of the company’s employees are already vaccinated and that the “aggressiveness of the [delta] variant means we need to get many more of our people vaccinated, and as close to 100 percent as possible.”
Surely, the anti-vaxxers will complain about how this is infringing on their freedoms, but they need to know that they have the freedom to go get another job.
