USA Today Fact Check Confirms Hospitals Get Paid More if Patients Listed as COVID-19, on Ventilators

Dr. Scott Jensen, a physician and senator in Minnesota, appeared on The Ingraham Angle on April 8 on Fox News. He made the claim that hospitals get paid more if Medicare patients are confirmed to have COVID-19 and get three times as much money if they use a ventilator.

This claim began with Jensen's appearance on Fox News, but it was also published on April 9th by The Spectator, a conservative publication. Snopes fact-checked this and called it a "mixture."

On April 15, Jensen took to Facebook to bring up the topic again:

"How can anyone not believe that increasing the number of COVID-19 deaths may create an avenue for states to receive a larger portion of federal dollars. Already some states are complaining that they are not getting enough of the CARES Act dollars because they are having significantly more proportional COVID-19 deaths."

Jensen still wasn't done. On April 19th, he made a video on his Facebook where he tripled down on the assertion.

Here is how USA Today came to a TRUE ruling on their fact check that hospitals do get paid more if patients are listed as COVID-19 and on ventilators:

Hospitals and doctors do get paid more for Medicare patients diagnosed with COVID-19 or if it's considered presumed they have COVID-19 absent a laboratory-confirmed test, and three times more if placed on a ventilator to cover the cost of care and loss of business resulting from a shift in focus to treat COVID-19 cases.

This higher allocation of funds has been made possible under the CARES Act through a Medicare 20% add-on to its regular DRG payment for COVID-19 patients, as verified by USA TODAY through the American Hospital Association Special Bulletin on the topic.

You know that means business with all of those sources.

Medicare has basically incentivized hospitals to blame everything on COVID-19, making it nearly impossible to know the true impact of this pandemic.