RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz just SHUT DOWN a policy that turned hospitals into vaccine enforcers.
Hospitals that got their employees vaccinated received more money.
Those that didn’t, or failed to report it, risked losing funding.
That’s over now.
Short thread🧵
This is a small win for the medical freedom movement—but an important one.
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In 2013, the federal government began linking Medicare payments to whether hospitals reported staff flu vaccination rates.
The stated goal was to improve care and reduce preventable illness.
But even then, hospitals were being pushed to prioritize compliance over patient-centered decisions.
Under the Biden administration, it got worse.
CMS expanded the rule—tying inpatient hospital reimbursement to flu and Covid vaccination reporting.
The data was published on the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network—not to improve care, but to publicly shame hospitals with lower vaccination rates.
Hospitals that reported high flu and Covid vaccination rates to CMS could qualify for major Medicare reimbursement bonuses—sometimes over $100,000 a year across value-based programs.
Those who didn’t comply risked losing some of their funding—or being flagged publicly on CMS comparison sites.
It created a powerful incentive: report high numbers or pay the price.
Hospitals weren’t asking “What’s best for our staff?”
They were asking, “What do we need to do to keep our full CMS funding?”
Below is one aspect of this overall incentive structure:
This example is drawn from the Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) program, which is just one part of a larger system that linked hospital payments to staff vaccination reporting.
CMS didn’t tell hospitals to fire employees.
But when your funding partially depends on vaccination stats, that pressure flows downward.
A pregnant nurse in Pennsylvania was fired for refusing a flu shot—even after offering to mask.
A respiratory therapist in California was fired after 30 years for refusing the Covid vaccine on religious grounds.
The list goes on.
We can’t say for sure these actions were caused by the CMS policy.
But it absolutely shaped the environment hospitals were operating in—and it gave them cover to punish dissent.
The good news is RFK Jr. just officially ended the CMS policy that tied hospital funding to staff vaccination reporting.
“Medical decisions should be made based on one thing: the wellbeing of the person—never on a financial bonus or a government mandate.”
Administrator of CMS Dr. Oz added:
“Doctors and other providers should have the same autonomy to choose what’s right for their own individual health care needs as the patients for whom they care.”
This move eliminates the financial pressure hospitals used to justify internal mandates, terminations, and surveillance of their own employees.
Hospitals will no longer be rewarded—or punished—based on how many of their staff are vaccinated.
It’s a major step toward restoring trust in the doctor-patient relationship and rolling back policies that turned care into compliance.
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