"How many children from covid?"
Too many.
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"The CDC has admitted that providing incentives to pay for COVID has driven up the number of COVID deaths."
The number of covid cases has driven up the number of deaths....
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.)
There isn’t a Medicare diagnostic code specifically for COVID-19. Using payment rates for similar respiratory conditions, Kaiser estimated the average Medicare payment at $13,297 for a less severe hospitalization and $40,218 for hospitalization in which a patient is treated with a ventilator for at least 96 hours.
"A COVID patient on a ventilator will need more services and more complicated services, not just the ventilator," said Joseph Antos, scholar in health care at the American Enterprise Institute. "It is reasonable that a patient who is on a ventilator would cost three times one who isn't that sick."
Medicare will pay hospitals a 20% "add-on" to the regular DRG payment for COVID-19 patients. That’s a result of the CARES Act, the largest of the three federal stimulus laws enacted in response to the coronavirus, which was signed into law March 27.
"This is no scandal," Antos said. "The 20% was added by Congress because hospitals have lost revenue from routine care and elective surgeries that they can't provide during this crisis, and because the cost of providing even routine services to COVID patients has jumped."
Julie Aultman, a member of the editorial board of the American Medical Association’s AMA Journal of Ethics, told PolitiFact it is "very unlikely that physicians or hospitals will falsify data or be motivated by money to do so."
"There are strict policies for reporting and, quite frankly, healthcare workers are only focusing on helping their patients and doing as much as they can with little resources," said Aultman, who is director of the medical ethics and humanities program at Northeast Ohio Medical University. "Ohio is reporting confirmed and suspected cases and so this is how our providers are responding to their patients -- they are being very transparent about confirmed versus suspected."
politifact.com |
