caryking said:
Guys, this data is important; however, what about fraudulent billing cases?
As Mormad has said over and over, it's very important from a public health perspective to note the presence of a highly communicable infection like COVID on the death cert if COVID is present.
Parsing "with COVID"/"from COVID" is nearly impossible in many/most of these cases. If you're older and weak and near death anyway and get COVID it's going to almost certainly contribute to your death. Who's to say in what proportion?
Also, presumably part of the higher reimbursement for COVID relative to other causes of death is because the expense of care gets ratcheted up for providers when they have to quarantine infected patients, use significantly more PPE, etc.
A big part of why they get reimbursed more would likely be because their costs are increased to try to keep the staff other occupants of the facility safe from a COVID-positive patient, whether that patient dies from COVID or dies from something else. Their cost structure changes as compared to caring for a patient at end of life due to COPD or something acute but non-contagious.
Fraudulent billing implies that places of care are listing COVID as the COD when the patient doesn't actually have COVID, which doesn't sound like what's going on here. Is it?
