The HPV vaccine saves lives. It does so by reducing a person’s chance of being infected by the human papilloma virus, a virus that causes a whole range of cancers including, most importantly, cervical cancer. Vaccinate your teenage daughter against HPV, and you will increase the chance she will live to old age. Simple as that.
Yet currently, the majority of American teenagers, boys and girls, are reaching adulthood without the full protection of the vaccine. Sometimes they don’t get vaccinated because they or their parents are opposed to the vaccine (for reasons that irk me too much to dwell upon right now). To increase vaccination rates, we need to overcome people’s resistance to this vaccine.
But there’s something else that’s preventing kids from getting vaccinated that might even be more maddening than anti-vaxxers– insurance companies aren’t covering the full cost of the vaccine, causing some physicians too, shall we say, less than aggressively promote the intervention. To increase vaccination rates among American children, insurance companies need to reimburse providers more generously for vaccinating their patients.
(To read the rest of the article, please visit Forbes.)
