The Real COVID Nursing Home Scandal Is Why Cuomo And Other Democrats Did It
What's worse than using political and legal authority to cause the agonizing deaths of a large number of elderly? Doing that as a cynical favor to monied corporate donors.
By Willis L. Krumholz and Robert Delahunty
March 10, 2021
Amid Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s sexual harassment allegations, and the scandal over his administration hiding the disgustingly high number of nursing home and group home deaths, few are talking about the elephant in the room. The big scandal isn’t that Cuomo is a creep, because everyone knew that already. The scandal isn’t even that Cuomo lied about nursing home deaths.
The real scandal is what lay behind the high nursing home deaths in New York and a handful of other states led by leftist governors such as Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Minnesota’s Tim Walz, and Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf. It is the story of how grandpa and grandma got tossed aside for money.
The high nursing home deaths were the direct result of policies that quickly discharged elderly or disabled COVID-19 patients from the hospital when they were still COVID-positive and then put them back in group or nursing homes. The hospital lobby directly engineered this approach, and these governors obliged.
The stated reason for the policy was concern about hospital capacity, but these states kept the policy well after COVID hospitalizations peaked in April. In states like Minnesota, the policy remained in place even though the health-care system never faced the strain that was initially feared. What you don’t hear is that hospitals didn’t want to keep Medicare and Medicaid patients (especially Medicaid patients) in hospitals for too long, because longer stays with such patients are less profitable.
In New York, Michigan, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, nursing homes were required or encouraged to admit COVID-positive patients. The COVID-positive patients then spread the disease to the rest of the residents, and group and nursing homes became epicenters for COVID-19 cases and deaths. Leftists try to brush this logic aside, but a report found a direct correlation between patients discharged by hospitals and COVID-19 cases.
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https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/10/the-real-covid-nursing-home-scandal-is-why-cuomo-and-other-democrats-did-it/
