Editorial: Administration should rescind threat to reduce hospital funding over COVID-19 data collection

Threatening to expel hospitals from the Medicare and Medicaid programs if they don’t report COVID-19 data to the federal government, which was outlined in a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services interim final rule released this week, “is ridiculous and should be rescinded,” according to a Washington Times editorial published yesterday.

“Hospitals know data collection is important,” the editorial says. “So does the government. The priority in all circumstances however must be patient care. The fact the demanded data has changed repeatedly during the pandemic as has the process for collecting it. Health care providers trying to save lives can’t keep up let alone understand at any given moment what the governors and feds want from them and without any additional funding or staff to help with this. They were set up to fail at data collection from the very beginning, and they are now being punished for focusing on patients first.”