INFLATION!

The Killer of Real Returns

Don’t be surprised if the misery index makes a come back into the main stream press and social media space all due to stubborn inflation and rising unemployment.

Till Next Time  

COVID 

Medical

Industrial Complex!

They knew what they were doing!

The excuse that “nobody knew,” or that hospitals were simply following the best available evidence, is absurd. 

Warnings existed before the COVID protocols were implemented and continued afterward.

 Hospitals ignored them regardless.

Hospitals Took Bribes to Kill You and Blame It on COVID

And they were given legal immunity to do it.

Dr. Wojak, M.D. Jun 9, 2026 The medical system is the leading cause of death in the United States,  killing well over half a million people every year.  But the COVID-19 era that began in 2020 marked a distinct chapter in its history: COVID protocols in hospitals killed massive numbers of people on top of the medical system’s usual death toll. Another half a million Americans were likely killed this way. To be clear, the COVID protocols discussed here are separate from the COVID vaccine that became widely available in 2021. I am referring to the treatment protocols—the testing, the drugs, and the mechanical ventilation of people’s lungs—that defined the 2020 hospital experience. This article examines the financial incentives the medical system had to kill patients and blame those deaths on “COVID.” What follows is an analysis of the money, the hospital protocols, and the death toll—regardless of one’s view on COVID itself. Hospitals awarded $100,000+ for killing you When a person with flu-like symptoms was advised to go home, rest, and hydrate, reimbursement was limited to a minimal consultation fee. But if that same person was admitted under a COVID diagnosis, administered remdesivir, and placed on a ventilator, the hospital could charge well over $100,000—and sometimes more than $400,000. The COVID hospital protocols functioned as a highly lucrative federal payment pipeline,  treatments that generated the most revenue were the ones most likely to kill you. NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines (2021), including remdesivir and mechanical ventilation. I. Testing (up to $1,419 per COVID test) A positive COVID test result was the triggering event that unlocked the federal COVID payment pipeline—allowing hospitals to transition patients into an extremely lucrative clinical pathway. While Medicare paid hospitals at lower rates for tests, the private market was effectively a free-for-all. Under the CARES Act, providers would post a cash price for testing, which insurers were required to pay for out-of-network claims.  Labs charged as much as $1,419 per test, and hospitals repeatedly tested patients to create a recurring revenue stream.  By treating testing as both a standalone profit center and the necessary key to unlock subsequent, high-value inpatient billing codes, hospitals used COVID testing as a key driver of revenue. Covid Testing Has Turned Into a Financial Windfall for Hospitals and Other Providers (KFF Health News, 7 May 2021) II. Admission (20% premium for COVID diagnosis) A positive test result funneled patients into the hospital under ICD-10 code U07.1—the universal designation for COVID.  The federal government paid a 20% premium on top of the standard Medicare payment for COVID-related hospital stays.  Because this premium was tied exclusively to the COVID diagnosis, hospitals had a huge incentive to prioritize the COVID designation over other conditions and pursue repeat testing until a positive result was achieved. CMS adds 20% to inpatient Medicare payment for COVID-19 patients (Healthcare Finance,18 August 2020) III. Remdesivir (65% premium for wrecking your kidneys and liver) Hospital protocols prioritized the administration of remdesivir, a highly toxic drug costing $3,200 per treatment course. CMS incentivized this choice through the New COVID-19 Treatments Add-On Payment (NCTAP), which provided hospitals another massive bonus payment—calculated as 65% of the costs exceeding the standard billing rate. Trends in New COVID-19 Treatment Add-on Payments (NCTAP) in Medicare Fee-For-Service (ADVI, 30 November 2022) Remdesivir—dubbed “Run, Death Is Near” by the doctors and nurses who watched patients deteriorate after receiving it—is a highly toxic drug that causes organ failure. It was a failed Ebola drug that was rebranded as a treatment for COVID, despite the fact that it was associated with a staggering 53% mortality rate in its original Ebola trial. In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of remdesivir published in The Lancet, patients received either remdesivir or a saline placebo. Remdesivir is so toxic that patients in the remdesivir group were forced to stop treatment early due to adverse events at 2.4 times the rate of those receiving the saline placebo. The drug’s toxicity is not a secret. It’s documented in the FDA’s own prescribing information, which mandates monitoring for liver damage because the drug is known to lead to liver failure. And it’s not just the liver. In a study published in Frontiers in Pharmacology, patients receiving remdesivir were nearly four times more likely to suffer acute kidney injury than those receiving other treatments. And once the kidneys failed, the fatality rate for those patients was over 36%. The World Health Organization found that remdesivir provided no survival benefit and recommended against its use—yet American hospitals continued administering it for years. Acute Kidney Injury Associated With Remdesivir: A Comprehensive Pharmacovigilance Analysis of COVID-19 Reports in FAERS (Wu et al., 2022) IV. Mechanical ventilation ($50,000+ for destroying your lungs) After wrecking a patient’s kidneys and liver with remdesivir, the next stage of the COVID protocol was the most lucrative and deadly of all: mechanical ventilation. The average cost to treat a non-ventilated COVID patient was $12,700, but by placing the patient on a ventilator, the average cost skyrocketed to over $65,500. Mechanical Ventilation Adds 5X the Cost to COVID-19 Care (Premier, 19 November 2020) Mechanical ventilation was a death sentence. Despite the well-known risks of ventilator-induced lung injury, hospitals ignored decades of best practices—which favored non-invasive oxygen support—and pivoted to early, aggressive intubation. Patients were sedated, paralyzed, and kept in a chemically induced coma while ventilators forced high-pressure air into their lungs. The results were catastrophic. In many hospitals, the death rate for patients placed on ventilators was above 80%. In New York, the death rate for people over the age of 65 was 97%. New Study Shows Nearly 9 in 10 Covid-19 Patients on Ventilators Don’t Make It (Bloomberg, 22 April 2020) V. Death ($100,000+ altogether for killing you) After wrecking your kidneys and liver with remdesivir, then finishing you off with a ventilator, the hospital could collect well over six figures for killing you—and in some cases hospitals charged more than $400,000. But the death certificate said “COVID.” This is another example of how the medical system launders the deaths it causes—with misleading ICD codes and death certificates that erase the hospital’s culpability. It was a self-reinforcing feedback loop: hospital-caused deaths inflated the official COVID death count, which was then used to justify the very protocols that caused those deaths. The financial incentives didn’t require the people working at hospitals to consciously think “let’s kill this patient for more money”—but they handsomely rewarded the sequence of interventions most likely to kill you. The protocol that maximized reimbursement was also the protocol that maximized mortality. Hospital bills vary for treatment of COVID-19, including charges for Veklury® (Remdesivir) (16 February 2022, ClaimDOC) At least half a million killed About a half million people in the United States were killed by COVID treatment protocols in hospitals—but similar protocols were adopted around the world, making the global death toll much higher. According to an analysis of all-cause mortality data by Denis Rancourt and colleagues, there were 653,463 excess deaths in the United States during the first 50 weeks of the COVID period, before the COVID vaccine was widely available. This figure represents deaths above the pre-COVID baseline during the period when COVID hospital protocols—including remdesivir and mechanical ventilation—were in effect. While Rancourt attributes these excess deaths to the broader government and medical response, the hospital protocols were the most direct means by which many of these deaths occurred. The spike in excess deaths during the pre-vaccine COVID period was synchronous with the protocol rollout, and the jurisdictions hit hardest were those that applied the protocols most aggressively, while places with different approaches were largely spared. This same pattern of synchronous, response-induced mortality hotspots was observed around the world, not just in the United States. Adapted from COVID-Period Mass Vaccination Campaign and Public Health Disaster in the USA (Rancourt et al., 2022) John Beaudoin also estimates that about a half million people in the United States were killed by COVID treatment protocols in hospitals. He obtained 1.6 million death certificates through FOIA requests and reviewed thousands of them line by line, including doctors’ notes and cause-of-death narratives. Beaudoin compared what certifying physicians wrote with what the CDC’s parser generated and found massive discrepancies. Beaudoin documented large increases in deaths from kidney failure and respiratory failure in 2020—conditions consistent with the harm caused by remdesivir and mechanical ventilation. These deaths then declined as hospital protocols became less aggressive and ventilators were used less indiscriminately. Legal immunity to kill you The medical system had full legal immunity for the treatments that killed people. The PREP Act granted complete immunity from liability for losses caused by “covered countermeasures” against COVID, including “any antiviral, any other drug, any biologic, any diagnostic, and any other device.” Remdesivir is classified as an antiviral drug. The paralytics used before intubation are drugs. Mechanical ventilators are devices. Every single component of these hospital protocols was a covered countermeasure. The immunity covered everyone involved: the pharmaceutical company that produced remdesivir, the device company that supplied the ventilator, the hospital where the protocols were implemented, the physician who wrote the orders, and the nurse who carried them out. Everyone involved in the COVID protocols was shielded. The only exception carved out by the PREP Act is “willful misconduct”—but short of a signed confession from someone saying “I intentionally killed COVID patients,” the exception does not exist. Declaration Under the PREP Act for Medical Countermeasures Against COVID-19 (Federal Register, 17 March 2020) They knew what they were doing The excuse that “nobody knew,” or that hospitals were simply following the best available evidence, is absurd. Warnings existed before the COVID protocols were implemented and continued afterward. Hospitals ignored them regardless. The evidence that the protocols were harmful existed before they were broadly implemented. Problems with remdesivir were known before its FDA authorization, and ICU physicians already understood that high-pressure ventilation can kill patients—yet the COVID protocols abandoned established practice by the medical industrial complex.

Stories You Can Use: 

The Gas Station Attendant Who Left $8 Million

A man who pumped gas and swept floors for a living died with an $8 million portfolio, and almost nobody who knew him had any idea.

The story goes as follows: Ronald Read grew up in an impoverished farming family in Dummerston, Vermont. He walked or hitchhiked four miles each way to get to high school, and he became the first person in his family to graduate. He served in World War II, in North Africa, Italy, and the Pacific theater. When he came home he went to work at Haviland’s service station, where he stayed for about 25 years. He retired for a year, then took a part time janitor job at a JCPenney store, where he worked for 17 more years until 1997.

He lived on almost nothing. Worn flannel shirts. He scavenged fallen branches for his wood stove. He drove a secondhand Toyota Yaris, and his lawyer remembers that on one of his last visits he parked far away from the meters just to save the coins. His only real indulgence was breakfast at the local coffee shop, where someone once paid his bill under the assumption that he could not afford it.

But every day he read the Wall Street Journal. His lawyer, Laurie Rowell, said that was about the only clue anyone ever had. “Investing and cutting wood, he was good at both of them,” she said.

When Read died in June 2014 at age 92, the town of Brattleboro found out what he had been doing all those years. He left $1.2 million to the Brooks Memorial Library and $4.8 million to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, the largest bequests each institution had ever received. “It was a thunderbolt from the sky,” said the library’s executive director, Jerry Carbone.

How does a janitor amass almost $8 million? 

He bought dividend paying blue chip stocks, held them for decades, reinvested the dividends, avoided companies he did not understand, technology especially, and never stopped. He was not a genius stock picker. 

He was a patient one, with a high savings rate and a very long horizon.

The Twist: 

FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out

Read is famous precisely because he felt none of the urges that drive most of us. No need to own the hot stock of the year. No panic when markets fell. No itch to sell what he had and chase what was moving. The bias he never fell for is the one most of us struggle with every week: FOMO, plus its quieter cousin, recency bias, the feeling that whatever went up lately will keep going up, and that we are somehow late if we are not in it.

We should be honest about the other side of this story too. Read is celebrated partly because his outcome was exceptional, and that is survivorship bias talking. For every janitor who picked blue chips and held for 50 years, there are plenty of people who picked the wrong blue chip, or the wrong anything, and quietly did far worse. Individual stock selection carries real risk, and no single outcome, however heartwarming, proves that picking stocks is the safest road.

The Takeaway: 

1. The savings rate matters more than the stock picks. Read’s fortune came from spending little, saving steadily, and giving the money decades. You can do the compounding part with an index fund and skip the stock picking risk entirely.

2. Stay with what you understand. Read avoided technology companies he did not get. For most of us, the honest version of that discipline is a low cost, diversified index fund. Boring is a feature, not a bug.

3. Give compounding time. Reinvested dividends did the heavy lifting over five decades. The single biggest input was time in the market, not timing the market.

 Bubble

Protection!

The U.S. stock market has been in a bubble for years; however investors who understand valuations and studied past bubbles know that this party will end.  And end it will with stocks regressing back to their mean and typically overshooting below.  Stocks: measured by the S&P 500 Shiller PE is 136% above its average a mockery of anything resembling investing!

Permanent Portfolio's Worst Decline...

During the 2008 financial crisis, the Permanent Portfolio Class I shares (PRPFX) experienced a maximum peak-to-trough drawdown of 27.16%. This drop started from a peak on May 20, 2008, and reached its trough on November 20, 2008, recovering relatively quickly compared to pure equity benchmarks. Price recovery took 221 trading sessions (roughly 11 months).

S&P 500 Index: Plunged -57% from its pre-crisis peak to its early 2009 trough, taking over four years to fully recover.

As long as U.S. stocks remain at nose bleed levels I’ll have an anti-thesis towards equities; the upside is now significantly less than the downside.  Its time for protection!  Gleaned from my model portfolio and/or PRPFX.

 Updated Monthly

AGGRESSIVE PORTFOLIO - ACTIVE ALLOCATION - 9/1/26

Active Allocation Bands (excluding cash) 0% to 50%

44% - Cash -Short Term Bond Index - VBIRX

32% -Gold- Global Capital Cycles Fund - VGPMX **

 24% -Lt. Bonds- Long Term Bond Index - VBLAX

 0% -Stocks- Total Stock Market Index - VTSAX

[See Disclaimer]

** Vanguard's Global Capital Cycles Fund maintains 25%+ in precious metal equities the remainder are domestic or international companies they believe will perform well during times of world wide stress or economic declines.  

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This site strives for the highest standards of accuracy; however ERRORS AND OMISSIONS ARE ACCEPTED!

The Dividend Yield Investor is a blog site for entertainment and educational purposes ONLY.

The Dividend Yield Investor shall not be held liable for any loss and/or damages from the information herein.

Use this site at your own risk.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS.

   

 

 

Bubble

News!

DYI:  This high rate of return has been maintained since 2018; however, the market’s acceleration is marginally slowing down.  A high return environment cannot be maintained with stock prices growing substantially faster than the overall economy.  Eventually stock prices – will regress back to the mean and overshoot to the downside.

This stock market and economy reminds me when everything peaked out in 1966 with stocks and bonds going into the tank until 1981 for bonds and 1982 for stocks.