Posting so residents aren't dissuaded away from peds fellowship by reading stuff like this. Not going to go into specifics since this not in the private forum, but residents & fellows can PM me for details. (tl;dr: We are well above 50%ile MGMA for pain doing 100% peds anesthesia.)
I'm several years out doing 100% peds, and I've been out-earning all of my co-residents who went into pain this entire time. They don't have in house call, but the hustling never ends if you want the 80+ percentile pain salaries. And my true "buy-in" was hundreds of thousands less than the pain guys.
Most my pain co-residents switched from one exploitative position to a new one, and had to start over at a new position or build their own practice from scratch. Several of them had to move their family to get outside of the non-compete. (Got that exploitative job to be close to family? Not any more...) They aren't even at their full earning potential yet, while I'm ready to scale down to 1-2 weeks a month. (I have to admit though that "dumb luck" investments helped, but it would have occurred within 3-4 years regardless.)
Just because a significant portion of the patients are medicaid doesn't mean that your compensation must reflect this. Push back against people who are trying to take advantage of you, and save your niceness for your patients. Pick a group and institution that values what you bring to the OR.