Fox News contributor suggests hospitals are inflating COVID-19 deaths for financial gain
Raymond Arroyo: “There's an incentive also monetarily for these hospitals, and hospital conglomerates to have COVID patients and COVID fatalities in their care”
Published
Citation From the April 13, 2020, edition of Fox Nation's Deep Dive
RAYMOND ARROYO (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Any local decision needs to be a local decision. That's why all this reporting about “President Trump needs to do this" and “President Trump needs to do that and lift the lockdown" --
LISA BOOTHE (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): I don't know which way it is.
ARROYO: Trump doesn't have the power to lockdown the country. The states do that. That's what happened here. He issued guidelines, and governors took it upon themselves to impose their own restrictions and guidelines on their people.
Now here's -- I agree with Lisa and obviously the Stanford researchers, they know much more about this than any of us on this panel.
However, I would say this. I am worried about the testing sample that you need to come up with data that can be really useful to policymakers. We're talking millions and millions of tests. And according to the many reports I've been reading, we could be a week to three weeks away from reliable tests -- a standard that could be adopted. That's one issue.
The other is, and Lisa raised this important point about who exactly is dying of the COVID virus. I spoke to a lot of hospital administrators this week, the CDC guidance on this urges people, if a doctor believes or suspects that their patient died of COVID, COVID is put on the death certificate. So there's an incentive also monetarily for these hospitals and hospital conglomerates to have COVID patients and COVID fatalities in their care.
We've got to be very careful about how these are being coded, who is interpreting that, and stack all of this data up. But it's got to be done quickly, Steve. I don't know how you can continue to lock down a country.