Readers can contribute to the Davies’ family financial legal defense campaign here.
(LifeSiteNews) — In recent months, LifeSiteNews has been at the forefront of efforts to protect patient rights all over the world, especially in regard to the right to be exempt from vaccine mandates for reasons of conscience and to obtain individualized medical care.
Just a few days ago, a judge’s landmark legal ruling involving a Catholic patient in Fauquier Hospital in Virginia delivered a significant victory for patient rights but left the patient’s family in dire financial straits.
This article will expose the way that federal policies enacted since the eruption of Coronamania reward hospitals and doctors for imposing “one-size fits all” medical treatment and denying patients their right to appropriate individualized medical care. It will then give an account of one family’s struggle to defend the right to individualized medical care and will invite readers to contribute to a financial legal defense campaign that will reimburse the family for the financial losses they have incurred to defend patient rights for all.
In a recent article by Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D., and Ali Shutz, J.D., entitled “Biden’s Bounty on Your Life: Hospitals’ Incentive Payments for Covid-19,” the authors document how policies enacted at the national level have created incentives for hospitals to deny patients their right to be cared for by doctors of their own choosing and to receive appropriate individualized medical treatment. According to Vliet and Shutz:
Creating a “National Pandemic Emergency” provided justification for such sweeping actions that override individual physician medical decision-making and patients’ rights. The CARES Act provides incentives for hospitals to use treatments dictated solely by the federal government under the auspices of the NIH. These “bounties” must be paid back if not “earned” by making the COVID-19 diagnosis and following the COVID-19 protocol.
The hospital payments include:
- A “free” required PCR test in the Emergency Room or upon admission for every patient, with government-paid fee to hospital.
- Added bonus payment for each positive COVID-19 diagnosis.
- Another bonus for a COVID-19 admission to the hospital.
- A 20 percent “boost” bonus payment from Medicare on the entire hospital bill for use of remdesivir instead of medicines such as Ivermectin.
- Another and larger bonus payment to the hospital if a COVID-19 patient is mechanically ventilated.
- More money to the hospital if cause of death is listed as COVID-19, even if patient did not die directly of COVID-19.
- A COVID-19 diagnosis also provides extra payments to coroners.
CMS implemented “value-based” payment programs that track data such as how many workers at a healthcare facility receive a COVID-19 vaccine. Now we see why many hospitals implemented COVID-19 vaccine mandates. They are paid more.
Outside hospitals, physician MIPS quality metrics link doctors’ income to performance-based pay for treating patients with COVID-19 EUA drugs. Failure to report information to CMS can cost the physician 4% of reimbursement.
Because of obfuscation with medical coding and legal jargon, we cannot be certain of the actual amount each hospital receives per COVID-19 patient. But Attorney Thomas Renz and CMS whistleblowers have calculated a total payment of at least $100,000 per patient.
What does this mean for your health and safety as a patient in the hospital?
There are deaths from the government-directed COVID treatments. For remdesivir, studies show that 71-75 percent of patients suffer an adverse effect, and the drug often had to be stopped after five to ten days because of these effects, such as kidney and liver damage, and death. Remdesivir trials during the 2018 West African Ebola outbreak had to be discontinued because death rate exceeded 50%. Yet, in 2020, Anthony Fauci directed that remdesivir was to be the drug hospitals use to treat COVID-19, even when the COVID clinical trials of remdesivir showed similar adverse effects.
In ventilated patients, the death toll is staggering. A National Library of Medicine January 2021 report of 69 studies involving more than 57,000 patients concluded that fatality rates were 45 percent in COVID-19 patients receiving invasive mechanical ventilation, increasing to 84 percent in older patients. Renz announced at a Truth for Health Foundation Press Conference that CMS data showed that in Texas hospitals, 84.9% percent of all patients died after more than 96 hours on a ventilator.
Then there are deaths from restrictions on effective treatments for hospitalized patients. Renz and a team of data analysts have estimated that more than 800,000 deaths in America’s hospitals, in COVID-19 and other patients, have been caused by approaches restricting fluids, nutrition, antibiotics, effective antivirals, anti-inflammatories, and therapeutic doses of anti-coagulants.
We now see government-dictated medical care at its worst in our history since the federal government mandated these ineffective and dangerous treatments for COVID-19, and then created financial incentives for hospitals and doctors to use only those “approved” (and paid for) approaches.
This massive collusion between federal bureaucrats and corrupt hospital administrators has had life and death consequences for hundreds of thousands of patients. Only rarely are patients and their families able and willing to pay the personal and financial price required to fight the system successfully. As reported in the Daily Wire, in October, Kathy Davies, mother of 5 and grandmother of 10, was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit at Fauquier Hospital in Virginia with COVID-19.
She was placed on a ventilator in the intensive care unit (ICU) on November 3, [which was her 63rd birthday] [Kathy’s husband] Donald was to serve as her medical proxy — and after consultation with [his son] Chris and his siblings — wanted doctors to give Kathy Ivermectin in hopes of finding success against COVID-19.
The doctors and hospital refused that request and were adamant they would not administer the drug despite the family’s wishes. On December 3, the Davies family notified Fauquier Health that they were hiring attorneys on Kathy’s behalf and filing a lawsuit.
LifeSiteNews recently reported on the case of John Sauer who was recently admitted to the ICU with COVID-19 in another Virginia hospital. Despite the heroic efforts of his wife, Mrs. Cynthia Sauer, to obtain proper individualized medical treatment for her husband, culminating in legal action to force the hospital to provide a specific course of treatment under the Right to Try Act, the hospital refused to cooperate with her requests and Mr. Sauer died in the ICU without having received the requested treatment. Profiting from the recommendations and the experience of Mrs. Sauer, Donald Davies and his son Chris were able to take Fauquier Hospital to court earlier this month. On December 9, Judge James P. Fisher of the 20th Judicial Court of Virginia ruled that the hospital must comply with the family’s demand for a specific course of treatment. According to an article in the Fauquier News:
The hospital had argued that the family’s physician could not direct patient care because she does not have privileges at Fauquier Hospital. But Fisher said in his ruling Dec. 9 that the requirement that a doctor have privileges is not written into state code and is therefore not a prerequisite.
Fisher also wrote in his decision that although hundreds of pages of legal and medical documents were submitted by both sides to support their arguments, “the court finds it unnecessary to descend into an analysis of the merits of Ivermectin as a treatment protocol.”
He wrote, “The specific provisions of the Health Care Decisions Act of Virginia control the rights of the parties and sets out a statutorily specific authority of the court to rule…. An agent operating under an Advance Medical Directive, as is the case here, is authorized with ‘full power to make health care decisions for [the patient]. The agent may consent to … medication,” and may “hire and fire [the patient’s] health care providers… That is what happened here.”
Thanks to the sacrificial action of the Davies Family which led to the judge’s ruling, Mrs. Davies was able to receive her first dose of Ivermectin from Dr. Martha Mathuri, a doctor chosen by the family, on December 13, and has received follow up doses as directed by Dr. Mathuri. The ruling represents a victory for patient’s rights everywhere, but it has left the Davies Family in dire financial straits.
Please prayerfully consider making a donation to the legal defense campaign to reimburse the Davies Family for their legal expenses.
Readers can contribute to the Davies’ family financial legal defense campaign here.
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