Democrats Established A Fund So Family Of Deceased COVID Victims Could Receive Up To $9,000. What Could Go Wrong?

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on Monday announced a new program established with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The program, which allows Americans to apply for financial assistance for COVID-related funeral costs, appears ripe for abuse.

“We’ve been on the phone trying to get as flexible and accommodating circumstances as possible,” Rep. Ocasio-Cortez said during a press conference. “So here’s what families need to know: your loved ones should have COVID on their death certificate, anywhere listed on their death certificate, either as their primary or contributing cause of death.”

According to the congresswoman, a number of Americans, especially in New York State, died in the early days of the pandemic and were unsure of the cause of death.

“… we didn’t know what was COVID and what wasn’t, so there’s options available here. One is that you can go back to the institution that issued the death certificate, the hospital, the physician, etc. and you can have your death certificate edited in retrospect, knowing what we know now about COVID,” she explained. “So if your loved one’s death certificate does not have COVID listed, you can have it put in.”

Schumer chimed in, saying COVID wasn’t listed as a cause of death until September, which leaves a six month gap where deaths weren’t attributed to the virus, adding that he and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez were working to “correct” that issue.

WATCH: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez breaks down how people can begin the process of receiving federal financial assistance for COVID-19 related funeral costs. https://t.co/hiFvaR3rC9 pic.twitter.com/EWqXoOdahK

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) April 12, 2021

Under the Schumer-AOC program, those who are eligible can receive up to $9,000 in reimbursement for burying a loved one who died due to COVID. That’s higher than the original $7,000 amount the pair was aiming for, Ocasio-Cortez said.

FEMA eligibility requirements include:

If you had COVID-19 funeral expenses, we encourage you to keep and gather documentation. Types of information should include:

• An official death certificate that attributes the death directly or indirectly to COVID-19 and shows that the death occurred in the United States, including the U.S. territories, and the District of Columbia.
  
• Funeral expenses documents (receipts, funeral home contract, etc.) that includes the applicant’s name, the deceased person’s name, the amount of funeral expenses, and the dates the funeral expenses happened.
• Proof of funds received from other sources specifically for use toward funeral costs. We are not able to duplicate benefits received from burial or funeral insurance, financial assistance received from voluntary agencies, government agencies, or other sources.

While the plan might sound appealing on paper and could undoubtedly benefit some low-income Americans, there are also serious questions that need to be addressed.

How COVID deaths are counted

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the way COVID deaths are counted is complex.

Part I asks for the ‘immediate cause’ of death, followed by any “conditions that led to the immediate cause,” the CDC explains in guidelines for certifying COVID-19 fatalities. For example: In some COVID-19 cases, the immediate cause is an affliction that arose from the disease, such as pneumonia, while COVID-19 gets listed under that as an underlying condition that led to death. In other words, COVID-19 caused the pneumonia.

Part II asks for conditions that did not set off medical events that led to death but contributed in some other way. Here, COVID-19 appears as sort of an accomplice to a fatality that was probably going to occur from something else (such as a preexisting, terminal disease), albeit later than if the person had not contracted COVID-19.

But the AAMC also warns that there are “gray areas” when determining a COVID death.

“There always have been cases where there are gray areas of death certification,” says Aiken, immediate past president of the National Association of Medical Examiners.

COVID-19 cases can paint lots of gray. In an instructional video for filling out death certificates in cases that might or might not be attributed to COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advises health professionals to “use your best clinical judgment.”

Relying on a medical practitioners’ “best judgement” is why some are skeptical. It’s not definitive but based on an opinion. That opinion varies from physician to physician which means there’s no way to apply standards equally across the board.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator at the time, didn’t ease suspicions. Last April she stated that anyone who had the virus at the time of their death, would be counted as part of the COVID death toll.

“So I think in this country we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality and I think the reporting here has been pretty straightforward over the last five to six weeks. Prior to that when there wasn’t testing in January and February, that’s a very different situation and unknown. There are other countries that if you had a preexisting condition and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem, some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death,” she explained in April of 2020. “Right now we’re still recording it and the great thing about having forms that come in and a form that has the ability to mark it as COVID-19 infection, the intent is right now that if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.”

Birx’s statement is why some have wondered what’s being counted as a COVID death, especially when a person has pre-existing conditions.

Amending death certificates

Schumer and Ocasio-Cortez encouraged those with loved ones suspected of dying from COVID in the last year to have death certificates amended so they have “COVID” listed as a primary or secondary cause of death. It makes sense, especially for those who passed away in February and March of 2020. It was early on in the pandemic and testing was scarce. There’s a very real probability that people died from COVID but their death certificates indicate a separate pre-existing condition, like heart disease or pneumonia, as the cause of death. But that doesn’t mean every single person who died since the start of the pandemic died from the virus. People still die from old age, cancer, heart attacks, etc. Those health issues didn’t suddenly disappear because of the pandemic.

And that calls into question a bigger issue: how do we know that those death certificate amendments are accurate? And how do we know COVID is actually to blame?

Say a person calls the physician and has the death certificate amended for their father who had Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). He was a smoker all his life and had difficulty breathing. He contracted COVID and eventually died when his lungs gave out. His lungs were shoddy to begin with before he contracted COVID. Is it fair to label his death as a result of COVID or COPD? What’s the differentiation between dying from COVID and dying with COVID? And do a person’s pre-existing conditions play into whether or not FEMA funding will be used for their funeral costs?

Will there be some sort of guidance given to physicians, medical examiners, and coroners on how to determine whether or not someone’s death certificate should be amended? Or will it be up to each individual’s discretion?

What happens when these very officials are inundated with death certificate amendment requests? Will they become so overwhelmed that automatically approve or deny them all?

There’s also a good chance that some people will see the reimbursement fund and go through the amendment process in order to qualify for assistance, even if their loved one may not have died from the virus.

A continual fund

Another big question: funding. How long will this funding go on for? Theoretically, someone could have a “COVID death” decades from now. If we apply Dr. Birx’s apparent logic about someone being counted as a COVID death because they previously had the virus, should someone who recovered now and died in 10 years due to lung damage be considered a “COVID death.” If that’s the case, then, in theory, this FEMA funding would have to remain intact for an entire generation. That means the federal government would have to plan for “COVID funeral funding” in every budget moving forward, until everyone that is alive now is gone.

It also makes you wonder: will people demand these types of funds moving forward? It creates a slippery slope for the government to pay for burial costs for a number of health-related issues. Cancer. Diabetes. Heart disease. Where does it end?

The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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