no. They do get higher Medicare payments for covid-19 deaths. I’d have to hunt down article but IIRC it’s a good bit. So there’s an incentive to mark non covid deaths as covid.
Since hospitals have been unable to perform elective surgeries, and they have bed space to do so, there is an incentive to Mark as many deaths as covid to cover no elective surgery losses.
for example, there was a 37 year old asymptomatic covid dude last week who died from a drug overdose. California called the drug addiction comorbitity and marked as covid 19 death.
here’s an article on the Ventura case