“Right now Medicare is determining that if you have a COVID-19 admission to the hospital you get $13,000. If that COVID-19 patient goes on a ventilator you get $39,000, three times as much. Nobody can tell me after 35 years in the world of medicine that sometimes those kinds of things impact on what we do.”
Dr. Scott Jensen says the American Medical Association is now “encouraging” doctors to overcount coronavirus deaths across the country.
Jensen received a 7-page document that showed him how to fill out a death certificate as a “COVID-19 diagnosis” even when there isn’t a lab test confirming the diagnosis.
“Right now Medicare is determining that if you have a COVID-19 admission to the hospital you get $13,000. If that COVID-19 patient goes on a ventilator you get $39,000, three times as much. Nobody can tell me after 35 years in the world of medicine that sometimes those kinds of things impact on what we do.”
This is absolutely bone-chilling.
Watch the interview below.
Original Sources: TheSpectator.info Fox News. Thanks to Wayne Dupree for bringing this article to our attention
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This isn’t as simple as it may appear, and the directive from the CDC isn’t wrong. If you’re a public health entity, you’re interested in compiling as many statistics about the disease at hand as you can find. That, ultimately, is what determines prevalence in a community, so you need to know that.
COVID 19 is really a clinical diagnosis. A lab test is simply not reliable. The sensitivity of the PCR test today is only 70%. That means that only 7/10 who are truly positive will be identified. But we see people everyday who have symptoms consistent with COVID who have negative tests. (NAME OF CLINIC) actually has a “suspected” COVID diagnosis code. When it takes 4-5 days in some cases to get a test result back, what are we supposed to do/say/diagnose those individuals who are sick with the typical symptoms while they wait? Go home? Assume you have COVID until further notice? What is my diagnosis that goes on the claim? Saying a death is COVID related without a positive test is not wrong, and clinical discretion is warranted. Can that be abused? Yes, it can in unscrupulous hands.
We see influenza deaths every year. Arguably the mortality rate from it is similar to COVID. It hits the same population group as COVID. People usually die of pneumonia. Some die of sepsis. Are those deaths called flu deaths? Or is flu just a contributing cause? I don’t know.
The secondary issue is how you fill out death certificates. If someone has COVID, develops pneumonia, and dies of Congestive Heart Failure, the death certificate should list the primary cause of death as heart failure, with contributing causes of pneumonia, and COVID. Many will argue that the true cause was COVID with pneumonia and heart failure as contributing causes. Those two ways of filling out the paperwork have significant ramifications for any of those diseases. Does it count from a public health perspective as a COVID death, or is it a cardiac death? The cardiac researchers want it to be cardiac b/c if their statistics are high, they have a better chance to get more research money. There is a huge amount of confusion about the seemingly simple issue of filling out a death certificate.
