Mr. Blaine Luetkemeyer (rep. MO): “One of the things that concerns me also is… with regards to the sort of perverse incentive for the medical folks to claim that somebody died of COVID versus, if it was an automobile accident, for instance, as long as you have COVID in your system, you get to claim it as a COVID death, which means you get more money as the attending physician, hospital, whatever.
And he acknowledged that the statistics he’s getting from the states are overinflated. We found that the Governor of Colorado, who is a Democrat, actually did research on this and found he had to get rid of 12 percent of the deaths that were recorded in the state.
Dr. Redfield, would you like to comment on that a little bit, about the perverse incentive? And is there an effort to try and do something different in the way that these deaths are recorded so we actually have better records and better numbers, better data to go with?”
Dr. Redfield: “I think you’re correct, in that we’ve seen this in other disease processes, too, really. In the HIV epidemic, somebody may have heart attack but also have HIV. The hospital would prefer the DRG for HIV because there’s greater reimbursement. So, I do think there’s some reality to that.”