WASHINGTON — The Trump administration tied billions of dollars in badly needed coronavirus medical funding this spring to hospitals’ cooperation with a private vendor collecting data for a new COVID-19 database that bypassed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The financial condition, which has not been previously reported, applied to money from a $100 billion “coronavirus provider relief fund” established by Congress as part of the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, signed by President Donald Trump on March 27. Two days later, the administration instructed hospitals to make daily reports to the CDC, only to change course.
In a statement, TeleTracking said it has three decades of experience providing health care systems “with actionable data and unprecedented visibility to make better, faster decisions.” Oakley said the CDC’s system was “not designed for use in a disaster response” and could not adapt quickly in a crisis. Allies of the CDC say withholding taxpayer dollars from the CARES Act in lieu of cooperation was an inappropriate effort to push hospitals into a system they were reluctant to use.
Some experts say this kind of cooperation with the private sector is long overdue. But the push also appears to be driven at least in part by an intensifying rift between the CDC, based in Atlanta, and officials at the White House and HHS, the parent agency of the disease control centers. But the public rollout of HHS Protect has been rocky. The nonpartisan COVID Tracking Project identified big disparities between hospital data reported by states and the federal government and deemed the federal data “unreliable.”
The Health Department’s spokeswoman said the intent was to complement the CDC, not compete with it. Like the CDC’s network, TeleTracking’s system requires manual reporting on a daily basis. But in June, Murray demanded the administration provide more information about what she called a “multimillion-dollar contract” for a “duplicative health data system.
“Ethically, it felt like they had taken a very trusted institution in the CDC and all of that trust built up with many public health people,” she said, then “moved it onto a politically and financially motivated portion of this response.”
ILLEGAL.
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