Chicago City Wire

Hospitals allegedly get paid more money if Medicare patients who have died are listed as having COVID-19, according to Republican Minnesota state Sen. Scott Jensen, who is also a physician.

However, a medical ethics professor counters that health care workers may simply be confused rather than intentionally inflating coronavirus cases.

"Assigning a cause of death is important yet tricky," said John Putz, who has a doctorate in philosophy from Saint Louis University where he taught medical ethics. "It is important because data about causes of death are used to make policy decisions, to direct research, and to allocate available resources for combating public health threats. It is tricky because there are innumerable variables that can contribute to a death, and choosing one or a few as primary causes or 'the cause' can easily be wrong or misleading."

Sen. Jensen recently told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that hospitals get three times as much money if they need a ventilator.

“In the current crisis, there's a real danger that we are seeing policy decisions that are destroying the economy in a misguided effort to respond to the wrong threats,” Putz told the Chicago City Wire.

The Illinois Department of Public Health reported 83,021 positive coronavirus tests statewide and 3,601 deaths as of May 13 while Cook County reported 55,470 cases and 2,449 fatalities on that same day.

Whether or not what Sen. Jensen reports is true, Putz said he has no doubt that the COVID-19 scare is in fact destroying the economy, stripping people of basic human rights, and putting an end to the legal right to assemble, protest in large groups and worship alongside others in public settings.

“A government that adopts policies that effectively shut down entire segments of the economy and guarantees high unemployment rates while increasing the amount it is spending in order to artificially prop up the economy can not continue to exist and function,” Putz said.

Of 1,946 fatalities in which coronavirus was listed as the primary cause of death by the Cook County Medical Examiner, 90% listed secondary causes of death alongside the coronavirus, suggesting that Cook County could potentially be employing coronavirus as a cause of death in order to gain funding just as Sen. Jensen said.

“Allocating one's resources as though COVID-19 and COVID-19-related pneumonia are the primary problems, rather than to protecting and treating patients with those pre-existing conditions, could be a huge misallocation of resources,” Putz said.

Further analysis by the Chicago City Wire of the Cook County data found that the most common types of secondary conditions in COVID-19 patients who died were respiratory conditions, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. 

"Our own understanding of our role or responsibilities in a context can make a huge difference in how we assign a cause," Putz said. "If someone, based on early, flawed statistics in the media, for example, is already committed to the idea that COVID-19 is far more dangerous than it has turned out to be, or if he or she believes it is important to extend the lockdown or to dedicate more resources to this perceived imminent threat than to other causes of death, this individual is likely to identify COVID-19 as the primary cause of death even in cases where the patient contracted COVID-19 when he or she was already dying from other far more serious conditions, such as congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cancer, or end stage renal disease. This sounds much different than saying that the patient died of complications related to one of their other pre-existing conditions."