by John-Michael Dumais, Childrens Health Defense:
In an interview on Children’s Health Defense’s “Vax-Unvax” bus, Dr. Paul Thomas exposed the financial incentives pediatricians receive for administering vaccines, including kickbacks of up to $240 per visit.
Can pediatricians afford to run their medical practices without the generous kickbacks they receive for vaccinating every child?
Dr. Paul Thomas, a Dartmouth-trained pediatrician, discussed this dilemma during an April 16 interview with Polly Tommey on Children’s Health Defense’s “Vax-Unvax: The People’s Study” bus tour.
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“You cannot stay in business if you’re not giving pretty close to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] [childhood vaccine] schedule,” said Thomas, who ran a general pediatrics practice with 15,000 patients and 33 staff members.
Thomas also addressed the risks and harms of vaccines — including COVID-19 mRNA vaccines — and the importance of boosting our immune systems naturally.
‘We were losing … over a million dollars’
Thomas, author of “The Vaccine-Friendly Plan: Dr. Paul’s Safe and Effective Approach to Immunity and Health-from Pregnancy Through Your Child’s Teen Year,” gave parents in his practice a choice: vaccinate their children on the CDC schedule, vaccinate more slowly by waiting for the child’s immune system to develop or not vaccinate at all.
As more patients refused vaccines, Thomas began to notice the financial impact on his practice.
He and his staff conducted a thorough analysis of their billing records, examining the income generated from vaccine administration fees, markups and quality bonuses tied to vaccination rates.
The results shocked him. “We were losing … over a million dollars in vaccines that were refused.”
He explained that pediatric practices heavily rely on vaccine income to stay afloat, with overhead costs running as high as 80%.
“It is very expensive to run a pediatric office,” he told Tommey. “You need multiple nurses, multiple receptionists, multiple billing people and medical records — it’s a huge operation.”
Three financial incentives for giving vaccines
Pediatricians receive several types of financial incentives for administering vaccines.
The first is the administration fee, which Thomas described as a “Thank you for giving the shot.” He estimated that pediatricians typically receive about $40 for the first antigen and $20 for each subsequent antigen.
“Let’s just say a two-month well-baby visit, there’s a DPT — that’s three shots, three antigens,” he told Tommey, plus “Hib [Haemophilus influenzae type b], Prevnar [pneumococcal], Hep B [hepatitis B], polio, rota [rotavirus] — [that’s] about $240.”
The second way pediatricians profit from vaccines is through a small markup on the cost of the vaccines themselves, though Thomas noted that this is not a significant source of income.
The third and most substantial financial incentive is quality bonuses tied to vaccination rates. Insurance companies offer pediatricians bonus payments for meeting certain benchmarks, typically around 80% of patients being fully vaccinated by age 2.
“I get dinged maybe 10-15% off of those RVUs — relative value units — that are ascribed,” he said, describing the points system used to calculate physician reimbursements.
With his practice’s vaccination rate a mere 1%, Thomas was at risk of losing up to 15% of his overall revenue.
“Really, it effectively means a pediatric practice cannot survive using insurance without doing most of the vaccines, if not all of them,” he said. “And I think that explains the blinders — [why doctors] just won’t go there and look at the fact that these vaccines are causing a lot of harm.”
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