You can go over to read the whole commentary at Focus, but this revolves around ICU beds.
There was an audit done by the Federal Court of Auditors in Germany. What they suggest (this morning) is that more vacant ICU beds existed than was admitted in public.
In simple terms....hospitals were manipulating the numbers. Why?
At some point, the Ministry of Health created a 'bonus-deal' where if the shortage existed....a hospital was paid to create new ICU beds out of thin air. Amount of the bonus? 50,000 Euro per ICU bed.
The government had to go out and find roughly 700-million to make this bonus deal work.
Typical cost of a ICU bed in the US? Between 20k and 30k dollars.
So you can do the math, these German hospitals....if they smart about this....just doing ten ICU bed additions....would mean 250k Euro added as 'profit'. Adding forty of them? That's a million added to the profit line of the hospital.
Was there anyone overlooking the ICU business? It just doesn't look that way.
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