Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is known first and foremost for his anti-vaccine crusades. However, he has also been saying some things that make sense. When Donald Trump first announced him as his pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), he announced his plans to go after the corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. This has the potential to shake up an industry that costs the country more than $650 billion a year, or $5,000 per family.

More recently he indicated his intention to go after the pay schedules for physicians in Medicare. This is also a really big deal. The Medicare pay schedules for physicians are largely designed by the physicians themselves, with the specialists deciding how much Medicare should pay them.

The result is a system that tends to hugely overpay specialists, partly at the expense of primary care physicians and partly at the expense of the rest of us who must foot Medicare’s bill. The impact of Medicare’s physician payment structure is amplified by the fact that many private insurers follow Medicare in setting their own compensation levels for physicians’ services.

This is a big part of the story of why we pay our doctors so much more than doctors in other wealthy countries. The average doctor in the US gets paid over $365,000 a year.........

© Eurasia Review