Forbes December 11, 2024
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) says he wants to reform the way Medicare pays physicians. In part, these reforms would address chronic underpayment of primary care physicians, relative to their specialist peers.
The starting salary of an orthopedic surgeon in the United States is $565,000. Family medicine physicians, by contrast, can expect a starting salary closer to $250,000, a good living by almost any measure, but a pay disparity that doesn’t strike most experts as reflecting the value, or importance, of these two specialties. If Kennedy wants to address this disparity he should expect significant resistance, as illustrated by recent HHS efforts to increase primary care pay.
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