No Evidence RFK Jr. Wants To Eliminate Medicare Coverage for Hip and Knee Surgery

In late December 2024, social media users began claiming that U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he wants to eliminate Medicare coverage for hip and knee surgery. 

The rumor appeared on Threads (archived), Facebook (archived) and X (archived), with some posts claiming Kennedy believes hip and knee surgery is unnecessary or a waste of money. 

However, Snopes found no evidence Kennedy wants to eliminate Medicare coverage for hip and knee surgery. Some reports from reputable news outlets suggested Kennedy could try to overhaul Medicare's physician payments, but an expert said in a phone interview that these reforms would not impact patient coverage. 

Kennedy's team did not return a request for comment as of this writing. Snopes will update this story if we hear back from them. 

What Does RFK Jr. Propose? 

If Kennedy had called for eliminating Medicare coverage for hip and knee surgery, it would be eminently newsworthy, given that he is Trump's pick to run the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicare policy.

A Google search for "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hip and knee surgery" returned no articles from reputable news outlets repeating the claim. Similar Google searches also returned no relevant results except for a Forbes magazine article titled "14% of Spine Surgeries are Unnecessary. Could RFK Jr. Change That?" However, the article discusses physician-payment reform, not the elimination of Medicare coverage for hip and knee surgery. 

A search of Kennedy's Facebook page, YouTube channel and X profile returned no posts or videos where Kennedy said he wants to eliminate Medicare coverage for hip and knee surgery. A Google search for the terms "surgery" and "Medicare" within Kennedy's presidential campaign website also found no relevant results.

However, despite finding no evidence of Kennedy wanting to eliminate Medicare coverage for hip and knee surgery, it is impossible to rule out whether he said this elsewhere or in private. His team also provided no response to our questions on the matter. Therefore, we were not able to rate this claim as outright false.

Breaking Down RFK Jr.'s Payment Reforms 

Robert Berenson, an expert in Medicare policy at the social policy think tank Urban Institute, said in a phone interview that, to his knowledge, Kennedy had not called for eliminating coverage of hip and knee surgery. 

"[Kennedy] does have a belief, at least from the books that I've read, that a lot of chronic conditions are preventable," Berenson explained. "He has a belief that if you do really good primary prevention, you won't need replacements. But I've never heard anybody attribute to him that he wouldn't cover the [cost through] Medicare if it's needed." 

Google searches for "RFK Jr. Medicare" and "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Medicare" only returned articles reporting that Kennedy may be interested in changing the way Medicare reimburses physicians for different services, as first reported by STAT News.

As reported by The Washington Post, Medicare's system tends to pay more to specialists for surgeries, as opposed to primary and preventive care — such as an annual physical or appointment with your general practitioner. That can incentivize physicians to specialize in specific medical fields like surgery rather than start a primary care practice. 

According to Berenson, these proposed reforms may actually lower surgery costs for patients: "Probably not enough to take a trip to Hawaii, but at the margins it would reduce it a little bit," he said. 

Medicare payments are complicated, and the amount a patient pays changes based on how long a patient needs to stay in the hospital, Berenson said, but overall if the physician gets paid less, the patient may pay less. 

Any money patients save through these reforms, Berenson added, may end up being spent on primary care and other physicians. 

Berenson also pointed out that these reforms will likely have greater impacts on other areas of patient care. The issue Kennedy may be trying to fix regarding overpayments to specialty physicians is not as acute with hip and knee surgeries, Berenson said. 

"The real overpayments are not with major surgeries," Berenson said. "It's with fairly mundane procedures and treatments like what dermatologists do, like freezing warts."