@Kamaji
@libertybele
Kamaji said: "Simple: order the hospitals to retain those patients. But the hospitals won't do that because it's contrary to their financial incentives."
No, not simple, complicated. "Who" orders hospitals to retain those patients? One cannot simply "tell" hospitals to do "X". Kamaji, Can you do that? No, neither can liberty or I. There are laws about dealing with human bodies, alive and dead. Hospital organizations have rules dealing with human bodies.
When one goes into the hospital as a patient, there are rules every hospital employee must follow regarding your body. You do not see those rules/laws, but they are hanging onto your body parts and everyone there knows the rules about the body part of which they are responsible.
@Cyber Liberty - how about a drawing with instruction tags attached to body parts.
If Mr. Cuomo has the authority to order various health care providers - such as nursing homes - to do or not do something - and last I checked, hospitals are subject to comprehensive state regulation and control - then he could damned well have ordered the hospitals to retain those patients and not release them until a suitable more permanent position had been found.
Instead, he chose to send them willy-nilly back to the most vulnerable population one could find. He might as well have taken a box of hand grenades, pulled all the pins out, and handed them over to the seniors with instructions to "not drop them".
Hospitals don't want to retain patients for longer than a few weeks because the money stops coming in after that - I know this for hard, cold facts because several aged family members have been thrown out of the hospital, not because they were ready to go, but because the period of maximum reimbursement from medicare and medicaid was coming to an end.
So please, let's stop the nonsense. Cuomo ordered nursing homes to take in sick, infected patients, without regard for the safety or welfare of the people already there, because it was to the financial benefit of the large hospitals in NY, who have a lot more pull over him than the nursing home providers do. On Long Island now there are, de facto, only two hospitals - Northwell Health and St. Francis. Several years ago there were at least three other providers, but they were all bought out by Northwell Health, without so much as a peep from Cuomo or the NY government.
It is all about the benjamins, and the hospitals stop getting benjamins when a person has been in their facility for a certain number of days, and once those days are up, it is almost impossible to get a diagnosis - short of going in and shooting the patient in the foot - that would allow them to stay.
And yes, it leads to the premature deaths of thousands and thousands of elderly patients.
The family members I mentioned have several children who spend hours and hours each month advocating for their aged parents, hours and hours of research to fact-check, and double-check, the two-faced nonsense that comes out of the mouths of most so-called doctors, and all so they can get involved in kafkaesque games with hospital administrators.
It's disgusting, and it's all about the benjamins for the hospitals. Got to pay for those gilded performance bonuses for upper management somehow.
