• Wonderful oped. I see manipulation of mortality stats every day. What needs to be looked at are the number of deaths in an ER. Most of the time these deaths aren't looked at as hard as a death in a regular hospital bed. Since that is the case some hospitals will move a patient to the ER "before" death so the stat shows as a ER death instead of in a hospital bed. It's not very ethical but when money is involved, ethics tend to go out of the window.