The Indicator from Planet Money - No, your doctor isn't getting rich off of vaccines

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Junior says doctors are pushing vaccines onto their patients in order to make profits. Healthcare in the US is a business … but does that mean that doctors actually make money on vaccines?Today on the show, we talk with doctors who explain the financial reality behind vaccines and how RFK Jr’s words and actions could harm public health. Related episodes: More for Palantir, less for mRNA, and a disaster database redemption arc What is a 'freedom economy'?For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Fact-checking by Tyler Jones. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. This is the indicator for Planet Money. I'm Adrienne Ma. And I'm Darien Woods. Over the past five decades, the World Health Organization estimates vaccines against diseases like hepatitis B, measles, and tuberculosis have saved at least 154 million lives. Now that is a pretty good batting record. Even so, the current head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,

has been on this campaign to undermine public trust in vaccines. And not only that, he's also criticized the doctors who provide those vaccines. Here he is in a video he recorded and posted on X last month. Should doctors make decisions based upon what's best for their patients? Or based upon what makes them the most money. Doctors are being paid to vaccine not to evaluate. They're pressured to follow the money, not the science. So, RFK Genius, says,

doctors are pushing vaccines onto their patients in order to make profits. And sure, healthcare in the US is a business. But does that mean that doctors actually make money on vaccines? So down the show, we fact-checked that. We'll talk with doctors who explain the financial reality behind vaccines and why RFK Jr's attack on vaccines could come at an even bigger cost to public health. That is after the break. So do doctors push vaccines onto patients because vaccines are profitable? For perspective on that, we first called up Jennifer Bacani-McCenni. I'm a family physician in Fredonia, Kansas, which is a town of about 2,200 people in southeast Kansas. Jennifer has been practicing family medicine for about 16 years. We do a little bit of everything here, so we're in the clinic, hospital, we're the ER doctors,

we're the nursing home, hospice doctors, all the things. So today it's relatively calm. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's a lot for one practice. Yeah, I think it's kind of, it's what we do in rural medicine. So I like to say we're the only gig in town, and we kind of do whatever we need to do for our patients. And that means everything from routine checkups to colonoscopies.

And of course, that service includes vaccines. We provide flu shots and pneumonia shots. We really do a majority of adolescent and adult vaccines. Jennifer says the decision of whether to recommend a vaccine to a certain patient is based on long-established guidelines from organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Family Physicians. So we asked Jennifer, does providing vaccines make money for her practice? So I would say at the best we're breaking even with our vaccines. The reason Jennifer says she's only breaking even is that providing vaccines come with a bunch of different costs. Typically, providers like her will purchase vaccines directly from the manufacturer.

These are little vials that can cost hundreds of dollars apiece. Then those vials have to be stored in special refrigeration units, which are not cheap. Many doctors buy insurance for those stored vaccines, because if the power goes out, they don't want to lose tens of thousands of dollars. and they have to pay nurses to administer the vaccines and assistance to process the paperwork so they can actually get paid by a patient's insurance. But even when the payments finally come, Jennifer says it's usually not enough to make a profit. The reimbursement for the vaccine itself, insurance companies would either barely cover the cost of the vaccine,

or it would be less than the cost of the vaccine. Sometimes insurers will also pay what's called an administrative. administration fee to help cover related costs. But she says it's usually only $5 or $10. To say that we made any money at all on vaccines is just completely false. I mean, the people who are giving vaccines in their private clinics are doing it because it's the right thing and because they can do it, but they know that it's going to be a loss or maybe break even on that cost.

And so you can probably see how, with all the same, these costs, doctors may be forced into making some difficult decisions of round vaccines. For example, Jennifer says her practice used to provide childhood vaccines for things like chickenpox and measles. The problem is each vial is expensive. And in a small town, you know, you don't, there's no guarantee that people are walking in every day meeting a vaccine. So if you maybe give a few vaccines one week and then you don't give another vaccine for another

month or two maybe, then those vaccines often will expire very quickly. And then you're just out that money, and that's hundreds of dollars. So Jennifer was actually losing money by providing children's vaccines. And that's why about 10 years ago, she stopped offering them. Luckily, she says, her patients could go to the town's health department for those shots. But still, I felt awful because like you said, as a parent myself, knowing that I would rather go to one place, get my well visit and get my vaccines all in one place. But I also knew if we were doing things that were losing money for our clinic, if we're not being financially responsible,

then we're not going to be able to take care of all the patients that we need to take care of. Jennifer's experience is actually fairly common. According to a 2017 survey in a journal called Academic Pediatrics, 12% of pediatricians and 23% of family physicians who were surveyed, said they stopped providing certain vaccines because of financial concerns. And yet, this has not stopped RFK Jr. from claiming that doctors are motivated more by money than what's good for patients. This claim is false. It is incredibly misleading. And to be honest, it's dangerous. David Higgins is a pediatrician in Denver, Colorado. He's also a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

David says, while the vast majority of Americans trust vaccines, RFK Jr's attacks on them could undermine that. I think he's hitting a nerve that I understand and that does make sense. And here's what I mean by that. Science is built on asking and answering really good questions. And that sometimes means being skeptical until it's proven that something is important. and works. And David says the evidence is in. Vaccines work. That's why organizations like the Academy of Pediatrics recommend them. Still, a recent poll by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania

shows there's been a decline in public trust for agencies like the CDC, which had long been seen as a trusted source for vaccine information. And if this sort of vaccine skepticism continues to grow, David is concerned we could see more outbreaks of vaccine preventable illness. Every drop that we see in vaccine uptake in a community leaves that community vulnerable to these infectious diseases, right? These diseases are not gone. Vaccines are victims of their own success. They have worked so effectively that people don't routinely see some diseases like measles. But that doesn't mean that it's not there.

As soon as vaccination rates drop in a community for, let's say, the measles disease, which is incredibly contagious, it's not a matter of if that disease is going to come back, it's a matter of when. And when is already happening? For example, this year, there's been at least 38 measles outbreaks so far, and that is more than double the number seen in all of last year. Each of these community-level outbreaks can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars to deal with, whether in direct medical treatment or public health measures. But of course, all that pales in comparison to the actual human costs. This episode was produced by Angel Carreras and engineered by Jimmy Keely. It was fact-checked by Tyler Jones,

Cake and Canon is our editor and The Indicators of Production of NPR.