You posting nonsense. Your scenarios show you have no idea how hospital billing, documentation, insurance and Medicare documentation and billing, coding, and hospital costs work in the real world. The actual cost to a hospital for a PUI that turns out negative and is this discharged is a fraction of what a positive Covid patient who spends 27 days in the ICU. Unless they’re are very sick with symptoms, we don’t even admit PUIs. We send them home to quarantine pending results. And if they are admitted, we get in house results back within 24 hours. Hospitals ain’t making bank on an 18 hour stay. For us that doesn’t even qualify as an actual inpatient admission. Those 2 day PUI stays are not being reimbursed like the positive patient who spends weeks on a vent in the ICU. Any “extra money” (lololololool) made from your mythical patient is quickly eliminated by the costs of the long term ICU stays of serious cases. Show me a hospital CFO who would choose to have a building full of confirmed Covid cases in the ICU and a bunch of PUIs over a building full of normal inpatient surgical patients and outpatient procedures and I’ll show you a bad CFO. They twisted facts and downright conspiracies that have developed around this issue are ridiculous. The average person has zero knowledge of the basic facts, so they hear this nonsense about hospitals being “incentivized” to inflate their Covid numbers to rake in more money and they just take it as fact. There are shady physicians who manipulate situations for monetary reasons but this is not that. Those kinds of docs do that to line THEIR pockets - there’s not a doc alive who would risk their career or future or freedom to make a hospital more money lol. The Medicare reimbursement rates are based on past guidelines for treatments of similar respiratory diseases and historical costs for ventilator care - The numbers weren’t just pulled out of their ass. As for the extra CARES money - That money is to help cover the treatment of the uninsured and to help cover the costs of purchasing extra supplies and equipment (thousands of extra PPE, cost of emergency staffing, extra vents, extra security, etc.). And note the language - “a ’portion’ of which will be ‘used to reimburse healthcare providers, at Medicare rates, for COVID-related treatment of the uninsured’.” A PORTION - that’s a weasel word with no guarantee. And, again, the “extra” money for classifying a Covid patient is peanuts compared to lost revenue elsewhere. That juice ain’t worth the squeeze. Finally, the fact that this claim originated from an interview with a Minnesota state Senator on Laura Ingraham’s show is worth noting. The Senator, Scott Jensen, is a family practice physician who has also said the following about Covid - -It’s no worse than the flu -He’s been supportive of anti-vaxxers -He’s currently under investigation by the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice for his statements on Covid