3 ms·

What is the financial incentive for reporting a COVID death vs something else? Why does such incentive exist? (I am assuming this is a US thing)

• Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  "Two weeks to flatten the curve" was due to fears that hospitals were going to be swamped with thousands of covid patients. Not only would there be the issue of not enough beds, ventilators, and trained medical personnel, the hospitals would quickly run out of funds to operate. The government wanted to keep this from happening so they created a fund that would pay hospitals money quickly for each covid patient they treated. This was to avoid the time consuming process of dealing with insurance claims and the uninsured. It unintentionally created a perverse incentive for hospitals to claim as many deaths as possible as covid deaths. That doesn't mean that all or even most hospitals are doing this, at least not intentionally but everyone working in the hospital is aware that it needs financial stability. Even if they're not intentionally sticking their thumbs on the scale to attribute deaths to covid that shouldn't be, there's going to be a bias for it. As for the amounts, you can probably find those with a web search but be aware that there's lots of bad information out there so be careful about the source you check.