Hospitals around here are hemorrhaging cash because of COVID. The subsidies (whatever they end up being) don't even come close to covering the costs associated with shutting down large portions of the hospital and large swaths of available services to handle COVID.
Thinking that the "health care industry" is stretching this out to suck on sweet subsidy teats is tin foil level nonsense. I promise they'd rather be back to charging folks for heart translants and ACL repairs so they could rehire the nurses and staff they've had to furlough.
I don't know where the truth is between "hospitals are making money off COVID" and "hospitals are going broke off COVID". It seems more of them are going broke, but it seems like both could be true at the same time...they could be hurting because of shutting down profit centers, while also milking the COVID subsidies, or at least taking advantage of them, if they exist.
About milking the COVID subsidies, I have two problems with this idea. First, I hear wildly different numbers about whether there are COVID subsidies at all, or how much they are. I ask 5 different people and they all heard the hospitals get between $3000 and 15,000 per patient. So how much is it, and why is the information not easy to find?
Second, no conspiracy-thinking is needed to believe that hospitals would "milk" COVID subsidies by over-treating COVID. Because hospitals over-treat at every opportunity; that's what they do, they treat, and they make money by treating. I'm not being excessively negative, but if you go to the hospital with a problem, and they have capacity for you, do not be surprised if they treat you for it.
I just watched a joint web conference of 3 local hospital systems about the current COVID situation in Idaho, which is taking off. It's not really a second wave, for Idaho it looks like the first wave. It looks like every state is going to eventually look like Texas and Florida, so you better get used to it. I suspect we didn't do ourselves any favors by locking down during the "first wave"; now that we are getting our true first wave in late Summer there is all this angst about whether kids can go to school or not. If we took the hit in May when kids were off school anyway we would be over it by now. Way to delay the first wave until potentially winter-time.
Back to hospitals over-treating for COVID, the doctors in the web conference all admitted that, aside from anti-inflammatory or steroid drugs, and aside from experimental procedures like the plasma treatments which are only available to a few people now, there is nothing that they can do to treat COVID. In the next sentence, they complained about how they were running short on (non-ICU) beds for COVID patients. So, if there is nothing they can do to treat it, why are they filling up the hospital with COVID patients? Probably because they have capacity for them, and they can bill for the beds. After all they can't bill for much else right now. It's not cynical, it's what's going to happen. The silver lining is the COVID patients won't run around spreading in the community if they are sitting in the hospital. But this is the problem when we hear that hospitals are "90% full". They are full of people who don't need to be there. If COVID numbers start to get real bad, like real-pandemic instead of political-pandemic bad, they will stop accepting patients that don't need intensive care.
I work with a French company and I stay informed on what's going on in France. Early on, in France they stopped testing anyone but the most severe cases. I know multiple people who got COVID and none of them got tested. The authorities also said if you have COVID, do NOT go to the hospital. Do not even go to the hospital to be tested. Do not go to the hospital unless you have certain severe symptoms. Otherwise STAY AT HOME. There is no point in you going to the hospital for a disease with no treatment. Currently, France's official case-rate is less than 10/100,000, and their case-fatality rate is 17%! Currently in the US, the case-rate is 124/100,00 and case-fatality rate is less than 4%. Obviously this difference is because the progression of the disease in the US is in an earlier stage, and also because the US is testing tons of people and admitting anyone to the hospital if they have a cough ("might as well charge for what we are able to charge for, ain't making any money off anything else right now"). Meanwhile Europe and the US-haters in the US point to the "terrible US response to the pandemic" when actually we are doing very well in comparison. We are testing more and treating more, and more people are getting care. Of course there are a lot of people who "want it to look bad" for political, schadenfreude, or other reasons who either don't know the picture or just ignore it, not surprisingly.
Although COVID is bad and is going to kill a lot of people, in hindsight, so far, if I can make an early call, I would say our public response should probably have been the same as every other viral disease, ever...wash your hands, stay at home if you are sick, isolate yourself if you are vulnerable, and, I would legitimately add, wear a mask in public situations where you can't maintain physical distance. That's basically what Japan did.
