Like many people I've heard stories that U.S. hospitals get extra funding for treating Covid-19 patients, but I didn't know whether or not that was true. According to a report done by CBS news, it is.
As per a CBS San Diego affiliate, hospitals treating patients for Covid-19 receive substantially more money than treatments for non Covid patients. The article cites a Minnesota State senator putting the amount at $13,000 for someone admitted with Covid and $39,000 if they're put on a ventilator. However a Medicare spokesperson says that the amount varies hospital to hospital based on variations in local costs.
Here's the link:
For those who aren't aware, hospitals in the United States are for the most part profit driven. That doesn't mean that the entire American medical system is removed from government funding. U.S. citizens aged 65 and up qualify for government provided health insurance via Medicare, so long as they've been residents for 5 or more years.
Given that the novel and mostly benign coronavirus overwhelmingly targets the elderly and health compromised, that's a lot of money for a country with a reported 1.1 million active cases. And that number is sure to keep climbing higher and higher, substantially higher if fears about the relaxation of lockdown measures prove true.
Does this financial incentive mean hospitals are falsifying discharge papers and death certificantes? Of course it doesn't, but it is possible. According to the report such actions would result in the payments being recouped as well as possible legal action.
Given my opinion of human nature, especially when money is involved, I don't have any difficulty in picturing hospital adminstrators pressuring doctors to list Covid-19 as a cause of death when someone dies of cancer or heart failure or any number of conditions. How would you be able to prove the deceased didn't have Covid? Would they dig up a body and conduct a coronavirus test post mortem?
And given the financial strain hospitals are under, well....necessity isn't just the mother of invention, necessity is also the mother of lies and deceit. U.S. hospitals are hurting financially right now, so much so that they're furloughing Doctors, Nurses and other staff. Reports say 1.4 million health care workers were laid off in April alone. No wonder so many American health care professionals are starting to speak out against lockdown measures.
On the flip side I also think its possible that some jurisdictions are underreporting. With the lack of availability of testing kits I have read news reports that some countries are not counting deaths as due to Covid unless there's a positive test to back it up.
And that makes this whole situation even more complicated. How can you manage a situation without reasonably accurate measurements. Financial incentives could be goosing the number of deaths in the United States, but it could also be lowering the numbers in countries like Japan where testing is a fraction of what's taking place in countries like the United States and Canada. Both Canada and the U.S. are testing over 35,000 people per one million of populaiton while in Japan its only a little over 2,000 per one million of population.
Thanks for reading, I'll have more to say later.
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I was speaking to my brother yesterday, a doctor who retired a bit over two years ago. He was an ER physician, a family doctor, any number of positions over the decades. He said he signed hundreds of death cerificates, and not one for flu that he can recall. Doctors are often pressed to sign certificates even for people not their patients because of scheduling, whatever. Family members would say granny died after getting the flu, but he would attempt to find out what their other illnesses had been. He knew the underlying cause for his own patients of course. Sure the flu might have precipitated a certain death, but not be the real reason the old person finally conked out. There are no standards in Canada for doctors to apply to cause of death, because well, old people die. Imagine what the standards are worldwide ...
Yet, worldwide flu annual death numbers are trotted out by WHO, and used by the right wing and others to say, well Covid-19 is no worse than the flu, or maybe just, say, a few times worse. Who in hell knows the real answer? Nobody, that's who.
Until he found out last night about the asymptomatic testing results in Calgary so far this week (3.6%) he was of the opinion that the chance of getting the virus round here in Nova Scotia was pretty darn small, and getting on for impossible in PEI or NB. So I opened my big mouth and blurted online that the re-opening measures in those two provinces was unreasonably slow and harsh, because his opinion was a lot more informed than mine, and the results he'd read about up till then made no cogent overall sense to him. He hasn't bothered wearing a mask, because he knows he can't infect anyone. Now he's going to, to protect himself from others, the opposite of the line we've been fed. He and I are both oldsters and likely to have worse than average response after getting the virus. Now try to find a mask after Tam "recommended" their use. Not a chance, they'll be like toilet paper.
Here we know that hospitals are relatively empty, ERs are running only 50%, doctors are saying on TV that their patients are staying away but shouldn't for treatment of all the normal maladies. People are freaked out, that's why. The constant media drum has us all turned into supine followers of Public Health official pronouncements. Same in the US for normal people, and business is down for the HMOs that pay doctors from insurance and raiding patients' personal bank accounts. Thousands of doctors have been delisted and have little income, because they aren't billing and generating enough profit for the private vampires who own the system. Upside down logic, but Onex who own Chapters and Westjet are an HMO in the US, and doing the same as the rest of those schmucks. Hail private health care. Not.
So I'm more than willing to believe US hospital docs are signing off deaths as Covid-19 to get extra bucks for everyone in the biz as it surely is, especially as the over 65's are government money on the hoof, so to speak.
Look forward to reading of your further research.
Bill Malcolm
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