How an under-scrutinized federal institution quietly fueled the worst harms of the Covid pandemic.

In short, CMS is the largest federal institution by budget. CMS served as both the carrot and the stick for the excesses committed during the Covid pandemic; they did this via three mechanisms:

• 1. Enforcement of hospital Covid vaccine mandates via threat of defunding.
  2. CMS add-on payments that incentivized harmful treatments like ventilation and remdesivir.
  3. ICD-10 coding made it impossible to distinguish asymptomatic Covid, which created a data bias that fueled fear-mongering.

In-depth:

Nurses Out Loud and other Covid dissidents have spent much time covering institutional capture at the FDA and CDC, where leadership has obviously been in bed with the medical-industrial complex for years. Those incestuous relationships deserve criticism, but another federal institution has been flying under the radar: the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

CMS oversees the health insurance for 160 million Americans; its budget is 2.3 trillion dollars a year. By comparison, the entire Department of Defense budget is only 2 trillion.

At a national level, the amount of American taxpayer money funneled into CMS is an existential crisis; our national debt is a terminal cancer, and CMS spending is the largest tumor. At an individual level, medical debt remains the top cause of bankruptcy. As we all know, this money is not being well spent as our chronic disease burden increases and lifespans shorten; the 2.3 trillion dollar budget of CMS is good for stock shareholders in the medical-industrial complex but bad for everyone else.

Our chronic disease burden only partially explains why America had the worst outcomes for hospitalized Covid patients in the developed world; another significant contributing factor was the financial levers pulled by CMS, which both caused catastrophic harm and served the interests of the worst Covid ghouls.

The stick: Covid vaccine mandates

• The enforcement mechanism of Covid vaccine mandates was the withholding of payments to hospitals from CMS for failure to comply.
• Hospitals can’t survive without taking payments from programs under the umbrella of CMS.
• Effectively, CMS told hospitals to force Covid vaccines on their staff or go out of business. CMS was not shy about it; here’s a screenshot of what was sent to hospitals:

For every story of careers lost to mandates, hospital staffing shortages, religious discrimination, and coercion that ended in harm, CMS played a critical role by wielding its trillion-dollar budget to force healthcare employers to obey. A mandate without a consequence is just a suggestion, and coercion is not consent.

The carrots: CMS add-on payments

By mid-2020, hospitals were losing 50 billion dollars per month because their most lucrative source of income, elective surgeries, had been canceled. These surgeries include procedures such as cataract surgery, diagnostic surgery (like an endoscopy), joint replacement, kidney stone removal, mole removal, carpal tunnel release, tonsillectomy, ear tube surgery, and cleft lip repair. These surgeries are a hospital’s primary source of income, and their biggest payor is CMS.

As hospitals were hemorrhaging money in mid-2020, CMS came to their rescue via what are called add-on payments. This was extra cash from CMS to hospitals for:

• Any Covid-positive hospitalization, even if they were asymptomatic
• Use of remdesivir
• ICU admission
• Ventilation

Hospitals were paid extra, sometimes by hundreds of thousands of dollars per Covid patient. Remdesivir was granted Emergency Use Authorization, which conveniently shielded hospitals from liability (for an antiviral drug so wildly harmful that even ebola patients are better off without it). While the number of Covid hospitalizations and deaths soared, some hospital systems started making record profits. How many deaths to remdesivir or ventilation could have been avoided by using FLCCC protocols instead?

CMS made it financially unfeasible for hospitals to try other treatments. Each death caused by remdesivir or ventilation was, of course, attributed to Covid.

The bias: ICD-10 coding

A definition from the CDC:

ICD-10-CM (the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification) is a standardized system used to code diseases and medical conditions (morbidity) data. Healthcare providers use ICD-10-CM codes when diagnosing patients.

CMS is responsible for overseeing the implementation of ICD-10 diagnosis codes at hospitals in the United States. When a person goes to the hospital, an ICD-10 code is entered into their Electronic Medical Record by their provider. These codes serve a variety of purposes, such as billing insurance and generating epidemiological data (such as that used by the CDC). Prior to Covid, there was a long-standing precedent of diagnosis codes for asymptomatic positives (HIV and bubonic plague, for example). In contrast, there was only one diagnosis code for a Covid positive patient: U07.1. Importantly, this made it impossible for hospitals to distinguish between patients who had Covid pneumonia and patients who were asymptomatic and in the hospital for something else; this is the “with” vs “from” scandal.

Here’s how I would see this play out on my inpatient psychiatric unit: a person would be admitted to the hospital for acute suicidal thoughts. They would test positive for Covid (often on a wildly inaccurate Covid quick test). They would then be counted as a Covid hospitalization despite not having so much as a sniffle. Record of their hospitalization would trickle up to the county, state, and federal levels. The government and mainstream media would then use biased Covid hospitalization data to drive fear narratives and justify their worst over-reaches: censorship, mandates, lockdowns, EUA for harmful products, school closures, and Covid vaccines for kids.

Since hospitals were being paid thousands of dollars more per Covid-positive patient, they were not incentivized to insist on more nuanced data; again, they had been losing tens of billions of dollars per month prior to CMS intervening.

We still really have no idea how many people actually died of Covid disease.

WHO is the villain here?

I would like to know who decided there would only be one diagnosis code for Covid. I would like to know why they made that choice and what discussions they had about it. You might think, “Well, that’s something that a FOIA request might uncover,” but unfortunately, you would be wrong.

Why?

Because the World Health Organization is not subject to the American Freedom of Information Act, ICD-10 codes might be implemented by CMS, but they originate with the WHO. That’s right, just when you think you couldn’t be any more pessimistic about the ghouls behind the curtains of the pandemic, the WHO raises its ugly, greedy, totalitarian head again.

Though we can’t compel the WHO to share their motivations, we can speculate:

• The WHO’s largest independent investors, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Gavi, had massive Covid vaccine investment interests.
• The WHO’s Pandemic Treaty power grab was a critical piece of the WEF’s plan to implement its vision of a one-world government with digital banking, vaccine passports, 15-minute cities, and “you will own nothing and be happy” aspirations.

It takes no stretching of credulity to spot the usual culprits of power and money. If hospitals had the ability to distinguish asymptomatic Covid, and if hospitals weren’t coerced into using harmful interventions, there would not have been the inflated death and hospitalization numbers used to justify censorship, mandates, lockdowns, EUAs, prolonged school closures, and Covid vaccines for kids. Wild manipulations had to be wielded for a virus that by itself was no worse than a bad flu season.

We could have had both nuanced Covid data and far fewer deaths were it not for the carrots and sticks wielded by CMS. Their harms were not because of pandemic chaos or the fog of war; they originated from methodical globalist entities with well-known purpose and intent.

Dr. Oz to head CMS?

With all the above in mind, it is critical that CMS is put under transformational leadership during the Trump administration. In my opinion, Dr. Oz is not the kind of leader CMS desperately needs. For one, he is overly conflicted with significant financial investments in pharmaceutical companies. Worse yet is the way he rolled over and fell in line behind Dr. Fauci after briefly entertaining the possibility of treating Covid with hydroxychloroquine. This is disqualifying.

The head of CMS should have gone to one of the many qualified Covid dissident doctors who had both the courage to challenge the machine from the beginning and the integrity to keep up the fight against incredible pressure.