| Hey readers, There are two things I want to talk about today on a lot of people's minds: the Covid-19 vaccination effort, and the stimulus checks that might be part of another relief package. Both have been the subject of intense discussions revolving around the idea of fairness.
In Israel, which has vaccinated more of its population than any other country, some of my young, healthy acquaintances have gotten vaccinated, even though it's not yet their turn in the priority order. That's because people who are not eligible are nonetheless allowed to wait outside the clinic to get these end-of-day leftover shots. The government encourages that, as part of an effort to get everyone vaccinated fast. Because the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines need to be used quickly or otherwise go bad, Israelis have decided that people not on the priority list should get shots rather than having doses go to waste. In the US, things are a bit more complicated. Some people have taken to waiting outside clinics and pharmacies to get leftovers, like my Israeli friends. But some vials end up wasted, dumped in the trash because a clinic had extras and no arms to put them in. Some clinics have even been threatened with sanctions if they deviate from the priority list. Americans prefer fairness over a faster rollout To my mind, that last outcome is a tragedy. But a recent Data for Progress poll, highlighted by Matt Yglesias at Slow Boring, shows many Americans don't feel the same. The poll found that 52 percent of Americans agree that "it's better to ensure people in higher-risk groups are vaccinated first than it is to allow some people to cut in line, even if it means some doses of the vaccine will expire." (Thirty-eight percent said the opposite, that it's better for some people to cut in line than for doses to expire.) And our politicians have been governing accordingly. Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York and Gov. Gavin Newsom in California have both warned they'll go after the medical licenses of providers who give vaccines to anyone who isn't high-priority, even if the doses would otherwise be trashed. A similar dynamic is at play over the stimulus checks that may end up part of a new relief bill. A different Vox/Data for Progress poll found 60 percent of Americans agreeing that "checks should be phased out based on income so higher income people receive less money," and 56 percent wanting to make sure the checks don't go to undocumented people. In both instances, the stated rationale for delaying help or making it more complicated to get it is to make sure the system is fair. But it's worth asking: How much fairness are all these rules even achieving? How attempts at fairness can hurt the most vulnerable In the effort to restrict the vaccine to the most at-risk populations, many states have created a baffling online maze that must be navigated to get one. State websites redirect to county websites, which link to long online forms that in some cases require uploading a scanned health insurance ID card. I live in California, and the rollout here has been so confusing that volunteers have resorted to crowdsourcing vaccine availability. The result? At-risk older adults, our least internet-savvy population, are having an awfully hard time getting vaccinated. And while many states fretted about racial equity when setting their complex vaccination priority schedules, in practice, white people are getting the vaccine at twice the rate of people of color –– because they're more likely to speak English fluently, have a car, and have internet access, they can more easily figure out where the vaccines are available and get there. A similar story is playing out with stimulus checks. I have friends who are genuinely poor and have spent much of the last two years homeless. They didn't get stimulus checks last year. Why not? Because efforts to means-test the program –– the full $1,200 checks went only to individuals who made below $75,000 in 2019 –– meant it ended up based on 2019 tax filings, and they didn't file taxes in 2019. There was another way to prove eligibility by filling out a 2020 1040, but it required internet access, a Social Security number, and other things that homeless people often don't have on hand. So, no checks for some of the people who needed them most. (President Joe Biden recently asked the Treasury Department to try to reach people who have not claimed their checks.) The point is this: There's a fundamental futility in trying to achieve fairness by putting more bureaucratic steps between the population and the help they need. The people who need help the most are going to have the hardest time navigating those bureaucratic steps. You may be trying to make a government program more fair by implementing these steps, but what if you just end up making them inaccessible? Right now, we try to verify whether a system is fair by looking for stories of cheats getting what they don't deserve. If there are cheats, the system's not fair, the thinking goes. What if instead we tried verifying whether a system is fair by looking at the target population and asking whether they can get the help they need? That'd be setting the bar a lot higher –– it's easier to scold cheats than to genuinely deliver services –– but it'd be setting it in the right place. —Kelsey Piper, @kelseytuoc | 
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