there sure are a lot of evergreen memes around lately…
so, here’s a deeply unsurprising little piece of evidence:
pro tip:
there is a name for when the government pays the insurers to pay to docs to push a product.
it is not “evidence based medicine.”
one might even ask some pointy questions about “informed consent.”
and this was A LOT of payment.
stop and do a little math here. (source)
so let’s call it 2,000 patients to be conservative.
this gets pretty juicy pretty fast and the incentives got cranked up hard starting sept 2021.
let’s say you had the US avg on sept 1, 2021 of 62% w/ 1 or more doses.
0.62 X 2000 X $100 = $124,000
now let’s say you tracked US average from 9/1/21 to 12/31/21 and got to 74%
that’s another 16% of your practice so
0.16 X 2000 X 200 = $64,000
and if you manage to eke out one extra percentage point to hit 75% vaxxed,
0.17 X 2000 X 250 = $85,000
so those incremental 20 jabs are worth over $1000 each to you. that’s quite the temptation…
maybe not all your patients are anthem medicaid etc, but anyone want to bet that similar spiffs were not on offer all over the medicare/medicaid and private insurance spaces?
you know what would be REALLY fun to look at?
vaccination rates in medical practices by insurance type. find the ones with “incentive payments” and ones without and see how it affected care.
sorry to say it, but doctors are not magic. they are just humans too and you can buy A LOT of ethics for a $209,000 payment in one year in tough times for super easy work.
is a doctor like that going to push vaccines?
you bet.
and will they be looking hard for reasons not to?
probably not.
this is a gross misalignment of incentives and conflict of interest.
doctors should NOT be paid per prescription to dispense drugs, not by insurers (likely getting federal gravy), drug companies, or anyone.
this is the most anti-patient, anti-informed consent practice imaginable.
we really have gone off all the rails on kleptocracy here.
and it’s long past time for some VERY pointy questions about just who these regulators and government program administrators work for.
From a TV commercial: "Do not take _____ if you have had a heart attack, chest pains, irregular heartbeat, stroke or mini-stroke, take MAOIs, have had heart failure in the last year, or sleep apnea" (I probably left some out). Rare side effect: death. But COVID injections are great for everybody; no contraindications all. I'm a survivor of two injections and a booster. They knew better. This was, frankly, homicide.
And the potential total bonus doesn't really matter, in case someone wants to argue the numbers. The fact that there is a spiff at all for a medical treatment is appalling.