Why Covid-19 Testing has become a Money-Making Machine. The RT-PCR Test Fraud

Hospitals are charging up to $650 for a simple, molecular covid test that costs $50 or less to run, according to Medicare claims analyzed for KHN by Hospital Pricing Specialists (HPS). Charges by large health systems range from $20 to $1,419 per test, a new national survey by KFF shows. And some free-standing emergency rooms are charging more than $1,000 per test

The article mentioned that there has been more than 400 million tests given since the Covid-19 was announced in 2020:

As the pandemic enters its second year, no procedure has been more frequent than tests for the virus causing it. Gargantuan volume — 400 million tests and counting, for one type — combined with loose rules on prices have made the service a bonanza for hospitals and clinics, new data shows.

Lab companies have been booking record profits by charging $100 per test. Even in-network prices negotiated and paid by insurance companies often run much more than that and, according to one measure, have been rising on average in recent months.  Insurers and other payers “have no bargaining power in this game” because there is no price cap in some situations, said Ge Bai, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has studied test economics. When charges run far beyond the cost of the tests “it’s predatory,” she said. “It’s price gouging”

Some hospitals, for example, New York-Presbyterian Hospital charges $440 for the PCR covid-19 tests although the national average is $159.  So just imagine the profits money-hungry hospitals are making:

The listed charge for a basic PCR covid test at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles is $480. New York-Presbyterian Hospital lists $440 as the gross charge as well as the cash price. Those amounts are far above the $159 national average for the diagnostic test, which predominated during the first year of the pandemic, at more than 3,000 hospitals checked by HPS

By the way, this is not a new development, Reuters reported back in July 2020 ‘How U.S. made Covid-19 tests a profitable disaster’ suggested that Covid testing is pretty lucrative business given the fact that fear of a particular disease will play a long-term role in producing permanent customers.  Here is an excerpt from Reuters that reported on the profits of certain companies who produce the test kits:

A U.S. patient with Covid-19 symptoms gets tested, then waits over a week for the results. The story is by now familiar and sometimes tragic. Yet the stock market is telling a different tale. Shares in companies like Quest Diagnostics and Laboratory Corporation of America are soaring. Quest’s Chief Financial Officer Mark Guinan said on Thursday that detecting Covid-19 brings “good margins.” In other words, testing has become a profitable disaster.

Commercial labs were hit hard by the pandemic, but their market values have recovered sharply. Within a month of its early March high of just over $15 billion Quest’s fell by around a third, but is now $17 billion. LabCorp too has recouped its pre-pandemic peak of $19 billion. Coronavirus diagnosis has more than filled the gap left as other procedures go on hiatus. Analysts polled by Refinitiv now predict Quest, which reported a 6.4% decline in quarterly revenue on Thursday, will earn $1 billion this year – over 10% more than they estimated six months ago.

No wonder: testing is lucrative. Last year Quest made on average $42 in revenue per procedure, based on numbers from its financial filings, and the average processing cost was $29. For Covid-19, the basic price set by government-backed insurer Medicare is $100. True, pandemic testing is unusually fiddly and more reliant on humans than some other types. But even with double the normal level of expense, to reflect the extra quirks and intricacies of the coronavirus, the company’s coronavirus-test margin would be one-third higher than it generates from its regular activities

One last important note to consider, the RT-PCR test is basically a fraud that has been consistently reported by the alternative media and other sources.

On November 27th, 2020, the Corman-Drosten Review Report which was produced by the International Consortium of Scientist in Life Sciences (ICSLS) said that

“if someone is tested by PCR as positive when a threshold of 35 cycles or higher is used(as is the case in most laboratories in Europe & the US), the probability that said person is actually infected is less than 3%, the probability that said result is a false positive is 97%. “ 

Bottom line, it is a fear campaign that created a steady stream of scared consumers every time a new variant is introduced to the public for a product that basically does not work.  It’s all a health scam, a money-making machine, at the end of the day, it is business as usual.

Timothy Alexander Guzman is an independent researcher and writer with a focus on political, economic, media and historical spheres. He has been published in www.Globalresearch.ca, The Progressive Mind, European Union Examiner, News Beacon Ireland, www.whatreallyhappened.com, EIN News and a number of other alternative news sites. He is a graduate of Hunter College in New York City.