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<\/picture><\/div>The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed in March 2020, created a 20 percent premium for COVID-19 Medicare patients. Senator Scott Jensen said the increase in payments for COVID-19 patients could motivate hospitals to list patients as having had COVID-19 before they died to receive more money from Medicare. He denied that he was accusing physicians of “gaming the system,” but said administrators or other officials in the health care system could be motivated to attach a COVID-19 diagnosis to patients.<\/p>\n
Joseph Antos, a health care scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told\u00a0Poli<\/a>tifact\u00a0<\/a>it’s “reasonable” for Medicare to increase payments for patients on ventilators because they require more care than someone who isn’t “that sick.” Antos added that there is “no scandal.”<\/p>\n While hospitals receive additional payments to care for COVID-19 patients, the financial benefit is based on services provided, not deaths, so there’s no financial incentive for health care providers to be killing patients, as conspiracy theorists have suggested.<\/p>\n In his mid-60s, Garrison could be considered at high risk of developing serious disease from COVID-19 and he acknowledged young people “tend to bounce back more quickly” but he and his wife are only feeling “slightly better” after two weeks.<\/p>\n Instead of seeking medical care, he told Gizmodo they’re taking Ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug that isn’t\u00a0FDA<\/a>\u00a0approved for COVID-19, and various vitamins. He also has no plans to get vaccinated against COVID-19.<\/p>\n “We will never take their foul spike protein-producing jabs, which are neither safe nor effective. They’re not real vaccines. They’re gene therapy,” Garrison said<\/p>\n