TOLEDO, Ohio — Many viewers have been sending our VERIFY team claims and questions to look into surrounding COVID-19. One social media post claims hospitals are designating all patients as COVID-19-positive for a financial gain.
There are still plenty of people who head to the hospital for non-coronavirus issues. Take this Facebook post (pictured below) for instance, shared by someone who apparently got into a motorcycle accident.
The post says in the ambulance, the EMTs called ahead to the hospital and said the patient was COVID-positive because the hospital gets paid for every COVID-19 case brought in.
WTOL 11 checked in with all four major hospital systems in our area.
Mercy Health never got back to us.
UTMC's answer was simple. The hospital uses a screening process to ID patients with symptoms or medical history that points to potential COVID-19.
Potential cases are then tested and confirmed or ruled out, but the hospital doesn't designate them as positive before that.
A similar answer from St. Luke's in Maumee. A spokesperson said the hospital wouldn't designate someone as COVID-positive unless a test actually confirmed it.
ProMedica's answer was also similar. Patients aren't designated as positive until they're positive.
However, Dr. Brian Kaminski said we've reached a point where the assumption is everyone has the virus.
"Depending on that patient's medical conditions, how they screen and the medical problems they're presenting with, we triage those patients," he said. "That's something we've done all along. We do it a little bit differently now that we have coronavirus."
With that said, money does play a role for uninsured patients, but it's not some back-room unspoken agreement to pad hospitals with cash.
But this is where it gets a little confusing.
Medicare pays hospitals based on a diagnosis-related group code or DRG.
Every patient is given one when they're discharged and it accounts for what they were diagnosed with and treated for.
There's no COVID-19-specific code yet, but PolitiFact -- a nonpartisan fact-checking website -- reported the average Medicare payment for patients with similar conditions was $13,297.
For more severe cases — like the use of a ventilator and longer stays — the average payment was $40,218.
On top of that, the new federal CARES Act says Medicare will pay an additional 20% on top of the original DRG.
So boiled down: yes, Medicare pays extra to hospitals for COVID patients. But that's the law.
And hospitals say they aren't just designating people as COVID-positive to pad their pockets.
So we can VERIFY the premise of this claim is absolutely false.
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