An article shared on Facebook questions whether the count of COVID-19 patients is inflated, saying hospitals have a financial incentive to claim that a patient has the virus.
"Hospitals get paid more to list patients as COVID-19 — 3 times as much if put on ventilator," the story’s headline states.
The article was posted on WorldNetDaily, a conservative news website. It was produced by The Spectator, which describes itself as a conservative publication. The Spectator reported on comments made by Dr. Scott Jensen, a Minnesota physician and Republican state senator, in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham.
The article was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)
Jensen said on Fox News that doctors are being encouraged to cite COVID-19 as a cause of death on death certificates and he suggested that money is a motivation.
Medicare has determined that a hospital gets paid $13,000 if a COVID-19 patient on Medicare is admitted and $39,000 if the patient goes on a ventilator, he claimed.
Jensen did not respond to our request for information.
The federal government has decided to pay hospitals more for treating COVID-19 patients. But it isn’t a windfall in the way the headline suggests. And there is no indication that hospitals are over-identifying patients as having COVID-19. If anything, evidence suggests the illness is being underdiagnosed.
How Medicare pays hospitalsMedicare pays for inpatient hospital stays using a diagnosis-related group (DRG) payment system. The hospital assigns a code to a patient at the time of discharge, based mainly on the patient’s main diagnosis and treatment given.
Medicare then pays the hospital a prescribed amount of money — regardless of what it actually cost the hospital to provide the care. The amount can vary in different parts of the country to account for labor costs and other factors.
The amountsThe dollar amounts Jensen cited are roughly what we found in an analysis published April 7 by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a leading source of health information. (Kaiser Health News, which partners with PolitiFact on health fact-checking, is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)
There isn’t a Medicare diagnostic code specifically for COVID-19. Using payment rates for similar respiratory conditions, Kaiser estimated the average Medicare payment at $13,297 for a less severe hospitalization and $40,218 for hospitalization in which a patient is treated with a ventilator for at least 96 hours.