Cost Sharing

I get the frustration, I really do. But punishing the unvaccinated by saddling them with potentially crippling medical debt is not right, no matter how you feel about their decision.

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 Everyone deserves health care regardless of the decisions they've made in their life; it's why we admit people to hospitals when they're sick or hurt, rather than allow them to die in the streets.
Jeva Lange "Nobody should go bankrupt for COVID-19 treatment. Even anti-vaxxers."

Perverse incentives 101: Allowing people to retain the benefits of opportunities they find, while spreading the costs of the risks they take among the populace at large is a recipe for increased risk-taking. It's one thing to conclude that compassion demands that people be cared for, regardless of whatever choices they've made. But telling people that any cost they feel should be extracted from people who make poor choices is a sin is asking for resentment. And in a society that already behaves as if resentment is a virtue, I don't know how helpful that is.

One of the characteristics of societies in general is that they bring together larger groups of people than might normally decide to be a part of the same collective. And the assignment of privileges and responsibilities across large collectives is always tricky. This is part of the reason why coupling those two concepts together tends to be a good idea, even when it's a given that it's not realistic to always do this.

It's worth keeping in mind that what Ms. Lange refers to as "punishing the unvaccinated" is little more than "Most private insurers are no longer waiving cost-sharing for COVID-19 treatment." In other words, treating a SARS-CoV-2 infection pretty much like any other reason that a person may be hospitalized. There is a legitimate point to be made that health care in the United States is broken in any number of different ways, and that one of those ways is that it's not completely socially subsidized (although, I would point out that the experience of nations with socialized medicine would argue against it being a cost-free panacea). But arguing that a specific disease or disorder should receive special treatment, just because, seems weak.

And if the point here is that medical care should be universally affordable (a nebulous term that seems to lack any real definition) regardless of what a person may or may not have done to require such care, then looking to place the responsibility on other parties is a poor justification.

Doesn't the Biden administration also hold some responsibility for not effectively reaching vaccine skeptics?

This makes a pretty big assumption, namely that it's always possible to convince someone to make the "correct" choice; all that one needs to do is "effectively reach" them. This is the sort of statement that people make because nothing is impossible to the person who doesn't have to do it themselves. The thought that "There has to be a way," is not the same as being able to articulate a way. And if responsibility for payment is going to be assigned according to responsibility for the actions taken, this simply sets up a dynamic of passing the buck (as is being done above). While it's a common Liberal viewpoint that the average person on the street is more or less helpless to care for themselves without some sort of professional intervention, that viewpoint can be used to argue for compulsory vaccinations. That certainly makes more financial sense than footing the bill for people who have decided that the arguments in favor of voluntary action are not credible.

What's worse, like those who abuse the emotional support animal system, the people who take a "rules don't apply to me" approach to the COVID-19 vaccine are actively endangering the members of the community they purport to be a part of.
Jeva Lange "COVID-19 vaccine 'medical exemptions' are the new emotional support animals"

Here is where I pick on Ms. Lange a bit, in shifting to another one of her columns on the topic of the vaccines, and people's refusals to avail themselves of them. I'm going to point out that in most societies, there tends to be little in the way of sympathy for people who are portrayed as actively placing other people in danger due to their actions. Making the point that people who are engaged in actively harmful activities should have the blowback to themselves social subsidized is something of a hard sell. In nations where medical care is exclusively tax-funded, it may be par for the course, but even then, other consequences are certainly going to be exacted, and this is not commonly considered a failure of compassion.

You never know another person's medical situation, and a lack of compassion for others isn't productive. But anti-vaxxers need to take accountability for their stances and not hide behind the language of others' real medical conditions.

Isn't expecting people sharing the costs of the medical expenses brought about by such stances, in the way that others are expected to as matter of course, a measure of accountability?

In the end, this is likely one of the pitfalls of being a columnist. Not all of the things one writes will be condense into a neat, coherent, whole. I know that I try to maintain a certain level of consistency, but my views on the world have changed over time (this is part of the reason why the "Rampant Idiocy" tag has been retired). Still, I think that it's often helpful to take a broader view than the one that ideology first presents.