“But if it's COVID-19 pneumonia, then it's $13,000, and if that COVID-19 pneumonia patient ends up on a ventilator, it goes up to $39,000.' Why? Because if it's a straightforward, garden-variety pneumonia that a person is admitted to the hospital for-if they're Medicare-typically, the diagnosis-related group lump sum payment would be $5,000,” said Jensen, whose claim was fact-checked by USA Today. 'Hospital administrators might well want to see COVID-19 attached to a discharge summary or a death certificate. 'Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome,' American businessman Charlie Munger once observed. Scott Jensen recently observed, hospitals are incentivized to pressure physicians to include COVID-19 on death certificates and discharge papers, since the CARES Act increases Medicare payments to hospitals treating COVID-19 victims. There’s a simpler explanation: incentives.Īs Minnesota lawmaker and longtime family practitioner Dr. So are hospitals conspiring to gin up COVID-19 deaths to make the pandemic look worse than it is? Probably not. “We’re being pressured in-house to add Covid to the diagnostic list when we think it has nothing to do with the actual cause of death,” Erickson said. When a reporter asked Erickson who was applying the alleged pressure on physicians, he said it was hospital administration. Not all states have taken an approach as direct as Illinois’s, but even where state guidelines don’t call for listing the mere presence of COVID-19 as the cause of death, it appears hospital administrators are taking a proactive role.

Ngozi Ezike, the director of Illinois's Department of Public Health, explained to reporters. “If you died of a clear alternate cause, but you had Covid at the same time, it’s still listed as a Covid death,” Dr. )Įarlier this month, Illinois’s top health official explained that any victim diagnosed with the novel coronavirus would be classified as a COVID-19 death-regardless of whether it contributed to the patient’s death. (There’s reason to question some of the snap conclusions the physicians reached in their briefing, but YouTube’s decision to ban them is absurd, if predictable. The longtime ER doctors, who had their video removed from YouTube after the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) jointly condemned their briefing, aren’t the only ones to say COVID-19 is being classified uniquely. “Why is that? Why are we being pressured to add Covid? To maybe increase the numbers, and make it look a little bit worse than it is?” When I’m writing up my death report I’m being pressured to add Covid,’” Erickson said.

Erickson noted he has spoken to numerous physicians who say they are being pressured to add COVID-19 to death certificates and diagnostic lists-even when the novel coronavirus appears to have no relation to the victim’s cause of death.

The California-based hospital owners may have uncorked a bigger story.ĭuring their long discussion with reporters, Dr. Artin Massihi of Accelerated Urgent Care held a press conference last week, their goal was to galvanize policymakers to reopen the economy.

Sue hospice for hasten death