Welcome to the latest edition of Investigative Roundup, highlighting some of the best investigative reporting on healthcare each week.
Rich Hospitals Get Richer With CARES
The wealthiest hospitals received the most bailout money from CARES Act economic stimulus distributions — while the neediest, often rural hospitals received much less, the New York Times reported.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has handed out $72 billion in CARES Act money since April to hospitals and other healthcare providers.
More than $5 billion went to 20 wealthy hospitals sitting on a combined $108 billion in reserves; many are non-profits that typically do not pay taxes on income tallying in the billions, the Times reported.
“If you accumulated $18 billion and you are a not-for-profit hospital system, what’s it for if other than a reserve for an emergency?” Robert Berenson, MD, a health policy analyst for the Urban Institute, told the paper.
Spokespeople for some of these hospitals said their organizations are losing millions during the pandemic, and accepted the HHS payouts in part to avoid layoffs, furloughs, and other cutbacks.
But the spokespeople neglected to cite their systems’ surpluses and, at least in the case of Providence Health System, instituted furloughs and told staff to expect pay cuts in July. Providence, which is based near Seattle, accepted $509 million from HHS even though it has $12 billion in reserves and paid its CEO more than $10 million in 2018.
Ascension Health, of St. Louis, received $211 million to support its 150 hospitals, despite reserves of $15.5 billion — enough to operate in full for 8 months without generating another penny in revenue.
On the other hand, St. Claire HealthCare, the largest rural hospital system in eastern Kentucky, accepted $3 million from HHS. That will cover 2 weeks of payroll, its CEO said: “This is just a Band-Aid.”
HHS did not account for a hospital’s financial resources when handing out stimulus checks. Instead, its primary goal was “to get relief funds to the largest number of health care facilities and providers as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson told the Times.
HHS still plans to distribute another $100 billion to hospitals and other providers.
Wuhan Covered Up Virus; Beijing’s Role Unclear
Local and provincial Chinese governments covered up the presence, spread, and potential deadliness of the novel coronavirus, because it feared slowing its economy, angering the national Chinese government and exposing “incompetence” in how it initially handled the outbreak.
That’s according to a CNN Special Report that aired Sunday night, which concluded that leaders in Wuhan and Hubei Province “clearly” initially covered up the virus. It remains unclear whether Beijing “was directing this or complicit in it,” said CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria.
What’s more, “Beijing has now even stopped permitting purely scientific papers on COVID to be published” without reviewing them first. Zakaria added that no apolitical research is permitted in China in part because it “is a dictatorship.”
Six days elapsed between China’s national disease control agency reporting to the national government that the virus was deadly and spreading and when it finally informed the rest of the world of a potential pandemic. Tens of thousands of people traveled in and out of Wuhan during that span.
Earlier, China told the WHO “a strange pneumonia” had emerged, but claimed it was not spreading. The next day eight doctors were detained and interrogated for “spreading rumors about the disease.” Soon the Wuhan Health Commission ordered doctors to get official government approval before reporting new cases. No cases were reported for weeks by city health officials, while COVID-19 patients filled Wuhan hospitals.
Domestically, vociferous reaction to the cover-up posed the most serious threat to the Communist Party’s rule of China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, according to the report. The national government responded by mythologizing Li Wenliang, the ophthalmologist who had been initially reprimanded when he tried to alert colleagues about the virus. Wenliang later died of COVID-19; the national government has since turned him into a national martyr — while also noting that he was a Communist Party member.
The national government applied successful yet authoritarian tactics to handle the virus’ spread. Officials dragged people from their homes to quarantine centers set up in schools and stadiums, sometimes breaking apart families. Drones flew over people not wearing masks on the street and reminded them to don their protective wear. Citizens’ temperatures were taken at numerous public places, according to the report. (See the show’s transcript here.)
March Travel Ban Chaos Helped Spread Virus
The Trump administration’s European travel ban in March not only failed to prevent coronavirus spread in the U.S., it may have hastened it by jamming planes and airports full of unprotected American passengers — including some already exposed to the virus.
According to the Washington Post, the administration’s delay in setting the ban also hastened the virus’ spread here, with more than 1.8 million travelers entering the U.S. from Europe in February, where the virus was already spreading rapidly.
The White House ignored calls from senior officials to restrict travel from Europe that month, while others countered that it would harm the economy.
Once President Trump agreed a few weeks later to restrict Europeans from entering the U.S., “logistical requirements of implementing this plan on a 48-hour timetable were not even meaningfully discussed,” the Post reported.
Many key agency officials were unclear about how to execute the new policy, and other officials and contractors were not prepared to address the massive influx of Americans who quickly boarded flights to get back to the U.S. before what many thought was a March 13 deadline. This came in large part because Trump mistakenly said in his March 11 televised address that he was “suspending all travel from Europe,” although in fact the order only applied to foreigners coming to the U.S. Some travelers understood that Trump spoke in error, but still raced home because they feared the administration might end the exemption for American citizens and legal residents.
The results: American airports were crowded with people not wearing masks, overwhelming passport control and customs. The number of passengers arriving from countries targeted by the restrictions soared 46% on the first day after Trump’s address.
At departure gates in Europe, many attendants spotted travelers with coronavirus symptoms and called supervisors. One airline industry official said the stock answer was to allow these passengers on board “unless they were demonstrably unfit to fly or had recently traveled to China.” Meanwhile, at the U.S. end, travelers received no screening of any kind.
Researchers now believe the majority of cases in the U.S. came from European viral strains, which were established in New York by mid-February. Two weeks prior to the travel ban, New York probably had more than 10,000 undetected cases, “with thousands more cases in San Francisco, Chicago and other cities.”
“A policy intended to block the pathogen’s entry into the United States instead delivered one final viral infusion,” according to the article. “The crush of travelers triggered by Trump’s announcement only added to that [already present] viral load.”
White House officials told the Post that many had considered a European travel ban “too draconian” before March 11. “The president took bold, early action that I think few leaders would be willing to take,” a spokesperson said.
Source: MedicalNewsToday.com
