Who’s gettin PAID?
PolitiFact: On hospitals and the possible financial incentive of COVID-19 patients
Medicare is paying a 20 percent add-on to its regular hospital payments for the treatment of COVID-19 victims. That’s a result of a federal stimulus law.
Registered nurse Robert Atchison cares for a COVID-19 patient recently in the intensive care unit at Gulf Coast Medical Center in Fort Myers. "We're saving everyone we can," Atchison said. [@2020 KINFAY MOROTI/SPECIAL TO TAMPA BAY TIMES | Kinfay Moroti]
Registered nurse Robert Atchison cares for a COVID-19 patient recently in the intensive care unit at Gulf Coast Medical Center in Fort Myers. "We're saving everyone we can," Atchison said. [@2020 KINFAY MOROTI/SPECIAL TO TAMPA BAY TIMES | Kinfay Moroti]
By Tom Kertscher, PolitiFact Staff Writer
Published 4 hours ago
An article shared on Facebook questions whether the count of COVID-19 patients is inflated, saying hospitals have a financial incentive to claim that a patient has the virus.
"Hospitals get paid more to list patients as COVID-19 — 3 times as much if put on ventilator," the story’s headline states.
The article was posted on WorldNetDaily, a conservative news website. It was produced by The Spectator, which describes itself as a conservative publication. The Spectator reported on comments made by Dr. Scott Jensen, a Minnesota physician and Republican state senator, in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham.
The article was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed.
Jensen said on Fox News that doctors are being encouraged to cite COVID-19 as a cause of death on death certificates and he suggested that money is a motivation.
Medicare has determined that a hospital gets paid $13,000 if a COVID-19 patient on Medicare is admitted and $39,000 if the patient goes on a ventilator, he claimed.
Jensen did not respond to our request for information.
The federal government has decided to pay hospitals more for treating COVID-19 patients. But it isn’t a windfall in the way the headline suggests. And there is no indication that hospitals are over-identifying patients as having COVID-19. If anything, evidence suggests the illness is being underdiagnosed.
How Medicare pays hospitals
Medicare pays for inpatient hospital stays using a diagnosis-related group (DRG) payment system. The hospital assigns a code to a patient at the time of discharge, based mainly on the patient’s main diagnosis and treatment given.
Medicare then pays the hospital a prescribed amount of money — regardless of what it actually cost the hospital to provide the care. The amount can vary in different parts of the country to account for labor costs and other factors.
The amounts
The dollar amounts Jensen cited are roughly what we found in an analysis published April 7 by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a leading source of health information. (Kaiser Health News, which partners with PolitiFact on health fact-checking, is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)
https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/04/22/politifact-on-hospitals-and-the-possible-financial-incentive-of-covid-19-patients/