Medicare is adding 20% to its regular reimbursements to hospitals for the treatment of COVID-19 victims. That’s a result of a federal stimulus law that was passed in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
But do hospitals get paid 23 times as much for a patient who dies from COVID-19 as for a patient who dies from the flu?
That’s the claim of a Facebook post that says:
"Check this out! Hospitals get $750 if you die from the flu, and $17,500 if you died from COVID-19. Now think about that!"
The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)
We’ve looked into other claims that point to the differences in reimbursement levels to suggest that hospitals have a financial incentive to improperly diagnose cases as COVID-19. But experts say if anything, the illness is being underdiagnosed.
In any case, the dollar amounts claimed in this post about flu and COVID-19 are misleading. The main thing to know is there are no set amounts paid to hospitals for either type of patient.
The $17,500 claimed roughly matches the average amount Medicare paid hospitals before this year’s outbreak for a patient with a COVID-like respiratory infection, such as pneumonia, who needed a certain amount of care. But private insurance typically pays twice as much as Medicare does, Tricia Neuman, who leads Kaiser Family Foundation’s program on Medicare policy, told PolitiFact.
As for the amount claimed for a flu patient, "no hospitalization ever costs $750 and has not in 30 years," said Gerard Anderson, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Hospital Finance and Management.
The 20% add-onThe federal government has decided to pay hospitals extra for treating COVID-19 patients on Medicare.
Congress added the provision because hospitals have lost revenue from routine care and elective surgeries that they couldn't provide during the crisis, and because the cost of providing even routine services to COVID patients has increased.