From [HERE] “Hospitals became the place where people go to die instead of the place where people go to get better,” said Zowe (not her real name), a medical coder who worked for several Phoenix, Arizona, hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an emotional testimonial with Polly Tommey on Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) “Vax-Unvax” bus earlier this month in Salem, Oregon, the whistleblower exposed the practices and protocols that she believes led to patient deaths.

As a medical coder, Zowe’s job was to review patient records and assign codes for diagnoses and treatments. The codes determined how hospitals and physicians were paid.

“I call it the central intelligence of the hospital or the SimCity level view,” she said.

But Zowe said what she witnessed during the pandemic left her distraught and compelled her to speak out.

Lack of COVID patients in early pandemic

According to Zowe, hospitals were not running out of beds when the pandemic first began and the “flatten the curve” initiative was announced.

“We didn’t have patients in the hospital at that time. They slowly started to trickle in maybe after months and months,” she said.

Despite the low patient numbers, hospitals were instructed to create bed capacity by sending patients home earlier than usual. Zowe noted that this practice was a significant change from pre-pandemic protocols, as it posed a financial liability for the hospitals.

“If patients came back, we would have to pay for their care,” she explained. “It’s a Medicare rule so that was definitely very different.”

Financial incentives for COVID treatment

New ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision) codes for COVID-19 diagnosis and an updated code for COVID-19-related remdesivir treatments were introduced in 2020, leading to significant financial incentives for hospitals treating patients with the virus.

“They had to have that diagnosis in order to get the 20% bonus for COVID patients,” Zowe said. She explained that a patient put on remdesivir also qualified the hospital for “an additional 20% bonus in payment because of the risk of an unproven technology.”

Hospitals initially received free hydroxychloroquine from the national stockpile and people treated with it “were actually doing well” before hospitals suddenly switched to remdesivir, Zowe said.

However, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the new ICD-10 codefor COVID-19 infections, effective April 1, 2020, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave remdesivir an emergency use authorization on May 1, things began to change.

“It was like a line in the sand,” Zowe told Polly. “We stopped azithromycin and hydroxychloroquineand we went straight to remdesivir.” [MORE]