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Do hospitals get paid for Covid-19 deaths?



I have read multiple social media posts making the claim that hospitals are getting paid money
for Covid-19 deaths. I found this claim shocking to say the least. So I did a little checking for
myself. This list is a small bit of the information that I found. What I found was that hospitals are
not getting paid for Covid-19 deaths. What is happening is that some hospitals, due to the
CARES Acts passed by congress, saw about a 20% increase in payments only for medicare
patients that required treatment for Covid-19.

Here are just a few pieces of information that I found . . . .

Do Colorado hospitals get extra money for coronavirus cases and deaths?
Yes and no. Hospitals do get higher Medicare reimbursements for COVID-19 care,
but there are no such payments for deaths by By JESSICA SEAMAN Denver Post
But there is no financial benefit to having a death certificate state that a person’s cause of death was directly tied to COVID-19, said Dr. Leon Kelly, El Paso County’s coroner, who also has served as deputy medical director for the county’s public health department during the coronavirus crisis.
“The coroner’s office is obviously funded by the county budget and it’s a fixed budget decided the year before,” he said. “There’s no additional funding that’s tied to the number of COVID deaths that are ruled in your county, or even autopsied and ruled by your coroner’s office.”


Fact check: Hospitals get paid more if patients listed as COVID-19, on ventilators
by Michelle Rogers, USA TODAY
The coronavirus relief legislation created a 20% premium, or add-on, for COVID-19 Medicare patients. There have been no public reports that hospitals are exaggerating COVID-19 numbers to receive higher Medicare payments.
Jensen didn't explicitly make that claim. He simply suggested there is an "avenue" to do so now that "plausible" COVID-19, not just laboratory-confirmed, cases can be greenlighted for Medicare payment and eligible for the 20% add-on allowed under the relief act.
US HHS Document to Doctors on How to Certify COVID-19 Deaths including Related Deaths
VERIFY: Do hospitals get paid more for COVID-19 cases? By Shannon Handy
Reporter CBS 8 
To date, News 8 could not find any hospitals cited for making inaccurate claims on discharge papers or death certificates. 

Fact check: Do hospitals get paid 'more' to treat COVID-19 patients?
By Tom Kertscher, PolitiFact reporter, WRAL-TV
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."


Hospital Payments and the COVID-19 Death Count
By Angelo Fichera FactCheck.org A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center
The CARES Act created the 20% add-on to be paid for Medicare patients with COVID-19. The act further created a $100 billion fund that is being used to financially assist hospitals — a “portion” of which will be “used to reimburse healthcare providers, at Medicare rates, for COVID-related treatment of the uninsured,” according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
As the Kaiser analysis noted, though, “it is unclear whether the new fund will be able to cover the costs of the uninsured in addition to other needs, such as the purchase of medical supplies and the construction of temporary facilities.”
Either way, the fact that government programs are paying hospitals for treating patients who have COVID-19 isn’t on its own representative of anything nefarious.
“There’s an implication here that hospitals are over-reporting their COVID patients because they have an economic advantage of doing so, [which] is really an outrageous claim,” Gerald Kominski, senior fellow at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, told us. And, he said, any suggestion that patients may be put on ventilators out of financial gain, not medical need, “is basically saying physicians are violating their Hippocratic Oath … it would be like providing heart surgery on someone who doesn’t need it.”

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