Donald Trump, Colossal Asshole, Says Doctors Get Extra Cash If People Die of COVID-19

As Donald Trump has made very clear since the start of the pandemic, he takes no responsibility whatsoever for COVID-19 killing nearly 230,000 Americans, despite the fact that (1) he’s the president and (2) it was his own incompetence and lies that allowed the virus to gain a foothold in the country. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” he said defiantly back in March, blaming the situation on, who else, Barack Obama. “I take full responsibility,” he said at the final presidential debate before remembering that no, he doesn’t. “It’s not my fault that it came here. It’s China’s fault.”

China, of course, has most frequently received the blame from Trump. “We built the greatest economy in history, we closed it down because of the China plague,” he said last month. “We must hold accountable the nation which unleashed this plague onto the world: China,” he said in an address to the U.N. General Assembly. Others who’ve been faulted for a situation he presided over include but are not limited to: Democrats, past presidents, the media, governors, and General Motors. Now, with cases surging—on Thursday alone, 90,728 new cases were reported in the U.S. and at least 1,004 Americans died—he’s found a new party to blame: doctors, who he is now falsely and insanely claiming get an extra $2,000 for every patient who dies of COVID-19.

“You know in Germany,” he told a crowd in Waterford Township, Michigan, “if you have a bad heart and you’re ready to die or if you have cancer and you’re going to be dying soon, and you catch COVID, that happens we mark it down to COVID. You know our doctors get more money if somebody dies from COVID, you know that, right. I mean our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is they say is, I’m but you know sorry everybody dies of COVID. But in Germany and other places, if you have a heart attack or you have cancer, you’re terminally ill, you catch COVID, they say you died of cancer, you died of a heart attack. With us, when in doubt, choose COVID. It’s true, no it’s true. No, they’ll say, Oh it’s terrible what he said, but it’s true. It’s like $2,000 more. So you get more money. This could only happen to us.”

The incredible thing here is that while there is absolutely no evidence that doctors (1) get more money for having a patient who dies of COVID-19 and (2) are thus gaming the system to line their pockets, it‘s absolutely what Trump, history‘s most shameless grifter, would do if he were in their position. (As has been said of the president: Everything he accuses other people of doing “can be understood in one of two ways: as projection or a confession.”) It’s also completely in character that while Trump has a lot of outrageous lies to tell about first responders, he has nothing to say about doctors working themselves to the bone for the last seven months, frequently without adequate PPE, risking their lives with little to no help from the federal government. Or that the situation has presented “unusual mental health challenges for emergency physicians,” at least one of whom died by suicide last April.

Friday wasn’t the first time Trump trotted out his new attack on the medical community—which, y’know, saved his life earlier this month. Over the weekend he accused doctors of padding their coronavirus death counts, saying at a rally in New Hampshire: “Some countries, they report differently. If somebody is sick with a heart problem, and they die of COVID, they say they die of a heart problem…. We report them, and doctors get more money, and hospitals get more money…. This country and their reporting systems are really not doing it right…. We’re gonna start looking at things, because they have things a little bit backwards.”

And in March, he insisted a lack of hospital supplies wasn’t his own fault but that of medical professionals, who he suggested were stealing them: “Something is going on, and you ought to look into it,” he told reporters. “Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door? How do you go from 10,000 to 300,000? And we have that in a lot of different places. So, somebody should probably look into that, because I just don’t see, from a practical standpoint, how that’s possible to go from that to that.”