Tag: doctors

Do Doctors Make Money Off Vaccines? A Look At Incentives And Bonus Structures

It’s worse than you think. The stats and link are at the bottom. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

“Doctors are being paid to vaccinate, not to evaluate,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a recent video.

“They’re pressured to follow the money, not the science.”

Doctors administer dozens of vaccines to many children in the United States. Adults are also advised to receive multiple shots.

Here’s what to know about vaccines and payments.

What Does the Literature Say?

A review of studies confirms that some doctors profit from vaccinating.

In a 2020 paper, researchers found when analyzing three years’ worth of vaccination claims for five Colorado clinics that reimbursements averaged 125 percent of costs, making administering vaccines “financially favorable across the practices.”

Another study found that various providers in North Carolina, when receiving the maximum payment for reimbursement from insurers or the government, profited from vaccinating patients. Even if they received the minimum payment, pediatric and family medicine practices still reported positive income, according to the 2019 study.

On the other hand, other doctors say the costs of administering certain vaccines to certain people exceed the vaccine payments.

In a survey of 34 pediatricians, for instance, more than half said they do not profit from vaccinating, according to a 2009 paper.

A number of practitioners have also said they face escalating costs associated with vaccination, such as staffing, leading them to stop or consider stopping providing vaccines to patients with private insurance.

Reimbursement for vaccinating patients varies depending on whether patients have private or public insurance. Under a program called Vaccines for Children, the government also provides vaccines to doctors for free. It does not pay for related costs, but doctors can charge an administration fee that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says “helps providers offset their costs of doing business,” with the maximum varying by state.

A nurse prepares to give a COVID-19 vaccine to a boy as his mother comforts him in Denver on Nov. 3, 2021. Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

What About Those Bonuses?

Doctors can make extra money for vaccinating under incentive programs from insurers, as highlighted by Brian Hooker, a senior scientist with Children’s Health Defense—a group Kennedy chaired through 2023—and other witnesses during a hearing in July on vaccines held by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).

“Some pediatricians can make upwards to a million or more a year just in those incentives,” Hooker said.

Asked for citations, Hooker pointed The Epoch Times to documents he collected from insurance companies that list available bonuses.

Links to those and other documents that outline incentives and are available online are provided below:

  • Blue Cross Blue Shield Blue Care Network of Michigan: $400 per child who receives a set of 24 or 25 vaccine doses on or before their second birthday.
  • Aetna Better Health of Louisiana: $10–$25 per member, depending on level of COVID-19 vaccination coverage practice-wide.
  • Molina Healthcare of Ohio: $100 incentive for COVID-19 vaccination.
  • Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield Medicaid: $50 per individual aged 6 months and older who received a COVID-19 vaccine by Dec. 31, 2022.
  • United Healthcare Community Plan of Michigan: Incentives for patients who receive the meningococcal, Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis), and HPV vaccines by their 13th birthday.
  • Meridian: Up to $120 per child who receives the 24 or 25 doses by their second birthday, or adolescents who received three certain doses by their 13th birthday, capped at $9,600 for each category.
  • BlueCross BlueShield of Illinois: $149 for each child, if 63 percent or more meet criteria, who received the 24 or 25 vaccine doses by the time they turn 2.
  • Central California Alliance for Health: Bonuses for children who receive at least 24 doses by the time they turn 2 and the three certain doses before they turn 13.

The sets of vaccines for which providers receive bonuses are recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

more here with statements from other Dr.’s and Kennedy.

Texas Doctor Who Falsely Diagnosed Patients To Fund Lavish Lifestyle Defrauded Taxpayers Of Almost $30 Million

A Texas doctor who defrauded federal health programs of $28 million as part of a massive $118 million scheme has been sentenced to 10 years in federal prison, the Department of Justice announced.

Dr. Jorge Zamora-Quezada, a rheumatologist based in Mission, Texas, falsely diagnosed hundreds of healthy patients with rheumatoid arthritis and subjected them to costly, unnecessary — and sometimes dangerous — treatments. His scheme targeted Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE, and Blue Cross Blue Shield, stealing millions in taxpayer dollars meant to support vulnerable Americans.

Prosecutors said Zamora-Quezada operated a years-long fraud out of his clinic, using his medical license and staff — many of whom were foreign workers dependent on their employment visas — to fuel a lifestyle of luxury. He purchased a Maserati GranTurismo, a private jet, and 13 properties across the U.S. and Mexico, all while exposing innocent patients to toxic medications with serious, sometimes permanent side effects.

“Dr. Zamora-Quezada funded his luxurious lifestyle for two decades by traumatizing his patients, abusing his employees, lying to insurers, and stealing taxpayer money,” DOJ Criminal Division head Matthew R. Galeotti said.

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Don’t Trust Me, I’m a Doctor

“Trust me, I’m a doctor” is a humorous expression that suggests one’s opinion should be accepted without question, regardless of whether the person offering the opinion has actual medical expertise or experience.

The assumption is that physicians are knowledgeable, competent, and trustworthy. At one time, few would have questioned that assumption.

Doctor

Image via Grok

In 2013, Rasmussen Reports surveyed American adults and discovered that a significant majority, specifically 81%, trusted their doctor. 

Four years later in 2017, that number was even higher, with 93% of patients trusting their regular doctor.

A funny thing happened in late 2019 and early 2020. In late 2019, almost no one had ever heard of COVID, coronavirus, or Wuhan.

The World Military Games were held, of all places, in Wuhan, China, in October 2019. A Department of Defense report from 2022 suggested that seven military members might have become infected with COVID-19.

We are only hearing about this now, two and a half years later. Apparently, this report was concealed among the Epstein files or Hunter Biden’s and Anthony Weiner’s laptops. However, the Biden administration covered up this report, just as they obscured their boss’s mental state and cognitive decline for four years.

Lies and coverups are a great way to destroy trust.

Dr. Anthony Fauci and his cabal lied to the public about the origins of COVID with their nonsensical “proximal origin” theory.

Why? To discredit President Donald Trump, who blamed China, and to conceal their illegal gain-of-function research.

Additionally, it may have been to maintain and protect money flow from China to the pharma-industrial complex.

This is one reason why trust in doctors and the medical profession has declined sharply over the past five years. You don’t have to take my word for it; I live and work in this new world of dwindling trust and observe it all around me.

The Journal of the American Medical Association conducted a survey of nearly half a million American adults across all 50 states and found, “The COVID-19 pandemic has been associated with a continuing decrease in trust in physicians and hospitals, which may necessitate strategies to rebuild that trust to achieve public health priorities.”

The Wall Street Journal, taking a break from criticizing President Trump over immigration and tariffs, noticed the declining trust in doctors. This past February, they published an article questioning, “Why we don’t trust doctors like we used to.”

They referenced a Gallup survey that stated, “Americans’ ratings of US professions stay historically low.”

In other words, it’s not only doctors who are held in low esteem but much of the administrative class as well.

Interestingly, another group of healthcare professionals topped the list, “Three in four Americans consider nurses highly honest and ethical, making them the most trusted of 23 professions rated in Gallup’s annual measurement.” Those surveyed must have missed the incessant TikTok videos of nurses dancing in ICUs during COVID.

And to no surprise for anyone engaged in politics and the news, “The least trusted professions, with more than half of U.S. adults saying their ethics are low or very low, are lobbyists, members of Congress and TV reporters.”

But it’s doctors falling most rapidly from grace, “About 53% of those polled in 2024 gave a high or very high rating to medical doctors, down from 67% in 2021. It’s the biggest drop among 23 professions ranked by Gallup in that period.”

There are many reasons. The WSJ offered a partial explanation:

People are increasingly wary of a healthcare system that is supposed to make them feel better but instead leaves them stressed and frustrated. And while much ire is directed at insurance and pharmaceutical companies, doctors are the front face of the system and are losing the public’s confidence, as well.

However, they overlooked the elephant that entered the room in late 2019, an elephant named COVID.

Consider the business and school lockdowns that closed churches while allowing strip clubs and liquor stores to remain open. It was illegal to surf alone in the Pacific Ocean, yet thousands marching together on city streets in the name of BLM or Antifa were considered perfectly safe and healthy.

Masks were deemed ineffective at protecting against tiny viruses until they were mandated as effective and lifesaving. As Dr. Anthony Fauci acknowledged, social distancing was arbitrary; “It sort of just appeared.” How’s that for science? As Gomer Pyle would say, “Shazam, shazam!”

The vaccines proved to be neither safe nor effective. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be hearing about sudden deaths, blood clots, or myocarditis. Additionally, those vaccinated and boosted would not continue to contract COVID. Or as a Cleveland Clinic study found, the chance of getting COVID increased with an increasing number of vaccine doses and boosters.

Children lost years of education and social interaction to avoid catching a viral illness that posed virtually no risk of death to children. Jobs, businesses, and livelihoods were devastated due to political motivations rather than medical science. What impact does this have on trust in the medical system?

The U.S. healthcare system is failing Americans. The Commonwealth Fund reports, “The US spends the most on healthcare but has the worst health outcomes among high-income countries.” In most businesses, this would signal a death knell. 

Then, there is the dysfunctional medical payment system, a combination of government and corporate control, which separates patients as consumers from physicians and hospitals as providers. 

The Medicare fee schedule, which serves as the basis for all third-party insurance payments, will reduce reimbursement by 3% in 2025. This marks the fifth consecutive year of payment reductions, even as the cost of providing care continues to rise.

Physicians are compelled to see more patients throughout their workday, which results in spending less time with each individual and longer waits for appointments or to see the doctor during a brief office visit.

Patients are understandably frustrated and now see a doctor’s visit similar to a DMV trip. 

The loss of trust extends beyond doctors; it includes the entire healthcare system, encompassing government-run health agencies and insurance companies.

The public has been overwhelmed by a continuous influx of misinformation, especially concerning the COVID pandemic, and has encountered censorship for asking questions or expressing complaints. Americans have been made to believe that our healthcare system is the best. 

Although the system may benefit certain patients in particular situations, we fail spectacularly on a population level. Practicing medicine is no longer a calling or profession; instead, it has become a people-facing service trade influenced by price controls and an increasing number of rules and regulations.

Any private sector business operating in such a manner would quickly go out of business.

Trust lost is difficult to regain. Through transparency and disclosure, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. may step in the right direction.

However, the basic structure of the healthcare delivery system is deeply flawed, and elected officials have no interest in undertaking the major reforms necessary to right the ship.

Healthcare spending in the U.S. exceeds $5 trillion, accounting for 18% of GDP, and continues to grow each year. Meanwhile, life expectancy in the U.S. is declining, and chronic diseases are on the rise.

Physicians who observe and voice any concerns may face censorship or threats to their medical licenses or employment. I experienced such backlash from the medical-industrial complex during the pandemic.

Clearly, what we are doing is not working, yet we are following the definition of insanity — doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result.

It’s no surprise that fewer Americans trust the healthcare system. The phrase “Trust me, I’m a doctor” is fading into obscurity like another ridiculous saying from the past: “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.”

We must be able to trust our doctors with our lives and well-being. Can we still do that?

source

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Public Trust in Health Agencies Gone, Former CDC Director Says

Americans don’t trust public health institutions, the virologist who used to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.  

“We have lost public trust, there’s no doubt about it, and it really harms public health in a big way,” Robert Redfield said Wednesday during an event at The Heritage Foundation, adding, “We’ve lost, I think, trust in science.”  

The lines between public health institutions and politics became blurred during the pandemic, Kulldorff said.

The National Institutes of Health is a government research agency and “their role is not policy or public health policy,” he said.

Yet, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly four decades until 2022, became quite involved in health policy while an adviser to two presidents during the pandemic.  

NIH “should have focused on doing the studies to find out, for example, about genetic drugs, if they can help against COVID,” Kulldorff said. But instead, he added, Fauci “sort of took over that public health policy, which doesn’t make any sense.”  

Schools shouldn’t have been closed and lockdowns shouldn’t have been widespread, Kulldorff said, but the “biggest chunk of the infectious disease research money was controlled by Dr. Fauci, so he took a very active role about the pandemic policy.”

Instead of a health system, Americans “pay for illness,” Redfield said, adding: “As long as you’re sick, the system works. We need to flip the switch … so that we pay for wellness.”  

One of the “root causes” of the public health crisis is that doctors are “at the bottom of the treatment pyramid,” Johnson said.

Doctors “should be at the top,” he said, but are being “crushed by the agencies” in a third-party payer system in America.  

story

how many times can a bartender piss in a mug and keep telling you it’s a beer? That’s what the government is doing to us

Why I Have Trust Issues With Doctors – 57% of US docs received payments totaling over $12 billion from Big Pharma in less than a decade

A report has found that nearly six in 10 doctors in the United States received payments from Big Pharma firms between 2013 and 2022.

This is according to a study done by researchers at Pennsylvania State University, which found that around 57 percent of doctors collectively received approximately $12.1 billion from medical device manufacturers and pharmaceutical drug makers between 2013 and 2022.

“Despite evidence that financial conflicts of interest may influence physician prescribing and may damage patients’ trust in medical professionals, such payments remain pervasive,” the researchers wrote.

The researchers used data from the platform Open Payments – a publicly accessible national database where drug and medical device companies disclose payments and gifts made to physicians – for their study.

They found that from August 2013 to August 2022, American drug and device manufacturers made more than 85 million individual payments to 826,313 of the more than 1.4 million eligible doctors in the United States.

The payments that the researchers included in their study were both in cash and non-cash equivalents. Most went to consulting services and non-consulting fees, such as payments for serving as a speaker.

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Supression of Hydroxycloriquine Began Before Covid, But It was Safe And Worked Against Covid – Part Deux

First, it would have saved a year and hundreds of thousands of lives. It would have eliminated the need for the mRNA jab.

What frosts my ass is that doctors went along with it because their licenses were threatened. They knew it would pass and a little rebellion would have held up the Hippocratic Oath.

This Is Me If I Were A Doctor

Oh, I’d write a lot of other stuff too. Imagine if an ex came in or a celebtard whining about their $20 million Disney contract? No telling what I’d write, but it would be good.

I know doctors pride themselves on straight lines when operating. They told me.

Just like the anti-matter a few posts below, there are some things I should be banned from doing. This would be close to the top of the list.

The State of Healthcare Firsthand, From the Doctor

I went to a hospital today to have a procedure done.  When the nurse apologized for the quantity of paperwork, I casually mentioned that things might become more complicated with Obamacare.
I was not ready for the answer.  Actually, being in a very socially liberal city and healthcare system, I thought I was going to hear support for the program.  I instead was told how government has corrupted the system, made it worse for both Doctors and patients and other horror stories.  I replied that the government has not helped healthcare in a long time to which the nurse responded that the decline of morals in our culture was the beginning of the problem.  How correct this nurse was.

Next, I met with the Doctor to go over what the procedure was going to entail.  I again mentioned whether the healthcare system was affecting his job.  Again I received a surprise answer.

The doctor told me of his passion for his practice all of his life.  He then told me that what is being done to us by Washington has him considering getting out.  He was honorable enough to not practice if he couldn’t do his best.  It was a John Galt conversation.  There are others like this doctor.  I’ve found that if you are contemplating your retirement in your mind, you are already in the process of retiring.

To a person, the hospital staff admitted that Washington and the damage they have done and are doing to our healthcare system makes it worse for patients and providers.  This is not a partisan statement for the record.

Let me point out that this was a highly successful practice with state of the art equipment and professional personnel making these perspicacious comments to me.

It was  clear that they wanted to help people and do their job, but our own government is in the way.  It seems obvious that they have overstepped their role in making sure that medicine is safe and lawful.

If I hadn’t heard it from the horse’s mouth, I wouldn’t have known.  I did go in looking for a cure, but I left with a dose of information.  It is easy to conclude that we need to fix or excise Washington from the healthcare system and put it back in the hands of the doctors.

Here is another story by a Doctor in a completely different area of the country from me that I read by chance on the same day as my procedure.

After 18 years in private practice, many good, some not, I am making a very big change.  I am leaving my practice.

No, this isn’t my ironic way of saying that I am going to change the way I see my practice; I am really quitting my job.  The stresses and pressures of our current health care system become heavier, and heavier, making it increasingly difficult to practice medicine in a way that I feel my patients deserve.  The rebellious innovator (who adopted EMR 16 years ago) in me looked for “outside the box” solutions to my problem, and found one that I think is worth the risk.  I will be starting a solo practice that does not file insurance, instead taking a monthly “subscription” fee, which gives patients access to me.

I must confess that there are still a lot of details I need to work out, and plan on sharing the process of working these details with colleagues, consultants, and most importantly, my future patients.

Here are my main frustrations with the health care system that drove me to this big change:

  1. I don’t feel like I can offer the level of care I want for my patients.  I am far too busy during the day to slow down and give people the time they deserve.  I have over 3000 patients in my practice, and most of them only come to me when there are problems, which bothers me because I’d rather work with them to prevent the problems in the first place.
  2. There’s a disconnect between my business and my mission.  I want to be a good doctor, but I also want to pay for my kids’ college tuition (and maybe get the windshield on the car fixed).  But the only way to make enough money is to see more patients in my office, making it hard to spend time with people in the office, or to handle problems on the phone.  I have done my best to walk the line between good care and good business, but I’ve grown weary under the burden of having to make this choice patient after patient.  Why is it that I would make more money if I was a bad doctor?  Why am I penalized for caring?
  3. The increased burden of non-patient issues added to the already difficult situation.  I have to comply with E/M coding for all of my notes.  I have to comply with “Meaningful Use” criteria for my EMR.  I have to practice defensive medicine to avoid lawsuits.  I have more and more paperwork, more drug formulary problems, more patients frustrated with consultants, and less time to do it all.  My previous post about burnout was a prelude to this one; it was time to do something about my burn out: to drop out.

Here are some things that are not reasons for my big change:

  1. I am not angry with my partners.  I have been frustrated that they didn’t see things as I did, but I realize that they are not restless for change like I am.  They do believe in me (and are doing their best to help me on this new venture), but they don’t want to ride shotgun while I drive to a location yet undisclosed.
  2. I am not upset about the ACA (Obamacare).  In truth, the changes primary care has seen have been more positive than negative.  The ACA also favors the type of practice I am planning on building, allowing businesses to contract directly with direct care practices along with a high-deductible insurance to meet the requirement to provide insurance.  Now, if I did think the government could fix healthcare I would probably not be making the changes I am.  But it’s the overall dysfunctional nature of Washington that quenches my hope for significant change, not the ACA.

What will my practice look like?  Here are the cornerstones on which I hope to build a new kind of practice.

  1. I want the cost to be reasonable.  Direct Care practices generally charge between $50 and $100 per patient per month for full access.  I don’t want to limit my care to the wealthy.  I want my practice to be part of a solution that will be able to expand around the country (as it has been doing).
  2. I want to keep my patient volume manageable.  I will limit the number of patients I have (1000 being the maximum, at the present time).  I want to go home each day feeling that I’ve done what I can to help all of my patients to be healthy.
  3. I want to keep people away from health care.  As strange as this may sound, the goal of most people is to spend less time dealing with their health, not more. I don’t want to make people wait in my office, I don’t want them to go to the ER when they don’t need to.  I also don’t want them going to specialists who don’t know why they were sent, getting duplicate tests they don’t need, being put on medications that don’t help, or getting sick from illnesses they were afraid to address.  I will use phones, online forms, text messages, house calls, or whatever other means I can use to keep people as people, not health care consumers.
  4. People need access to me.  I want them to be able to call me, text me, or send an email when they have questions, not afraid that I will withhold an answer and force them to come in to see me.  If someone is thinking about going to the ER, they should be able to see what I think.  Preventing a single ER visit will save thousands of dollars, and many unnecessary tests.
  5. Patients should own their medical records.  It is ridiculous (and horrible) how we treat patient records as the property of doctors and hospitals.  It’s like a bank saying they own your money, and will give you access to it for a fee.  I should be asking my patients for access to their records, not the reverse!  This means that patients will be maintaining these records, and I am working on a way to give incentive to do so.  Why should I always have to ask for people information to update my records, when I could just look at theirs?
  6. I want this to be a project built as a cooperative between me and my patients.  Do they have better ideas on how to do things?  They should tell me what works and what does not.  Perhaps I can meet my diabetics at a grocery store and have a dietician talk about buying food.  Perhaps I can bring a child psychologist in to talk about parenting.  I don’t know, and I don’t want to answer those questions until I hear from my patients.

This is the first of a whole bunch of posts on this subject.  My hope is that the dialog started by my big change (and those of other doctors) will have bigger effects on the whole health care scene.  Even if it doesn’t, however, I plan on having a practice where I can take better care of my patients while not getting burned out in the process.

Is this scary?  Heck yeah, it’s terrifying in many ways.  But the relief to be changing from being a nail, constantly pounded by an unreasonable system, to a hammer is enormous.

Doctors Disagree on How, But Most Want To Fix Healthcare

From Kevin MD:

Three out of four dentists recommend this tooth brightening toothpaste — make your smile sparkle like never before! Six out of seven plumbers recommend this drain opening de-clogger — make your bathtub drain like never before! Nine out of ten doctors recommend improving the medical system in the United States — make your health care system heal like never before!

But how do we do that?

Do doctors think the Affordable Care Act is the soothing balm for the festering wound that is the economics of the American medical system—paying too much while delivering too little population health? What do our health care experts think about health care reform? Do we think it is a step in the right direction? A step towards doom and damnation?  A small step for insurance companies, a huge leap for mankind?

It goes on to say that they need to read the bill to see what is in it.

Read more here

However, here is what is in the bill  click on it to find out what is in the bill and what rights we the people lose like financial control over our own assets and our own doctors.  We do lose that despite what congress and the POTUS say to the contrary.