But wait, all my idiot union members say hospitals are raking in the cash with covid cases and that's why everyone that dies is a covid death. It's like printing money. When these saw jockeys are not cutting steel they work as doctors and nurses on the side.
Yeah. They're wrong. Spectacularly wrong.
Medicare pays a premium (so far it's been in the form of block payments separate from the usual reimbursement) for COVID-related treatment. But private insurers, who cover most Americans, do not. Also, Medicare requires the same level of scrutiny they do for any other claim. You need a positive test result, you need to submit your utilization review for stays longer than a couple of days (the "two midnight" rule). You need all the same clinical data that any other claim requires. The idea that they could just slap a COVID dx on a patient and make fat stacks of cash comes from people with zero knowledge of how hospitals bill. A doctor fraudulently putting COVID dx on a patient faces the loss of their license or worse. And since hospitals don't exactly share revenue directly, there's literally no incentive for them to do so.
And again, that's only one payer.
second edit:
This also ignores the fact that, again, when hospitals move to surge capacity they lose the ability to perform all those actual revenue generating procedures (knee replacements, heart catheters, CT scans, etc.). Those make up for
far more of our revenue that the "normal" medical care for people sick with COVID. It also ignores the fact that respirators aren't cheap, and neither is the frightening amount of PPE we all suddenly go through.
Basically, my point is that anyone claiming that hospitals or doctors or whomever "just list everyone as COVID so they can get paid more" is a moron and I wonder how they've lived as long as they have without simply forgetting to breathe one day.
