- Apr 23, 2016
- 31,511
- 44,381
- AFL Club
- Essendon
No I didn't read it(as I said in my post) because it is behind a paywall/subscription request, thanks for copy and pasting for me.
From your pasting >
There have been no public reports that hospitals are exaggerating COVID-19 numbers to receive higher Medicare payments.
"Recent legislation pays hospitals higher Medicare rates for COVID-19 patients and treatment, but there is no evidence of fraudulent reporting."
told PolitiFact it is “very unlikely that physicians or hospitals will falsify data or be motivated by money to do so.”
________________________________________________________________________________
My take on it is that they are not denying that the more Covid cases you have the more funding you get, in fact they are implicitly saying that that is the case.
"no public reports" "there is no evidence of fraudulent reporting" "very unlikely that physicians or hospitals will falsify data or motivated by money to do so"
I may be overly cynical but that doesn't read like much evidence that no rorting of numbers is going on, just that they couldn't prove it. The big eyeroll for me is that it is "unlikely" they would not be motivated by money.... IMO big bureaucratic organisations like hospitals would be extremely motivated by money/funding.
You're free to believe what you like, but there's little to no evidence that any widespread abuse of the system occurred.
No comment regarding my last sentence? That treating a coronavirus patient is more costly than a run of the mill pneumonia one?
I'm sure they get paid more for plenty of stuff, I haven't seen anyone talking about widespread abuse of the Medicare system with hospitals mis-reporting heart attacks or anything else. This stuff is also audited.
As the article itself said, there's no evidence and no public reports. This is all conspiracy theory stuff.