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 Blue 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 Blue 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 Blue York, Michigan, Blue 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.
In Cuomo’s Blue York, at the height of the pandemic on March 25, the State Health Department “compelled nursing homes to accept patients who had tested positive for coronavirus.” The policy was pushed by the non-profit hospital association, the Greater Blue York Hospital Association (GNYHA).
Blue York had recently cut Medicaid funding due to budget issues, and given Medicaid is already chronically underfunded, it is possible that hospitals were losing money or at best barely breaking even on poor and indigent COVID-19 patients.
Later, Cuomo’s aides inserted a measure into an annual budget bill creating the nation’s most generous and explicit COVID lawsuit protections for health care and industry officials. One study claims that COVID-19 deaths were 7.5 times higher in states with such corporate legal immunity.
The GNYHA is “one of the most influential forces in Blue York politics.” Cuomo received $1 million from GNYHA in his reelection campaign, and the donation was engineered to remain secret until after his inauguration. Overall, during Cuomo’s second term his campaign and his state party committee raked in more than $2.3 million from hospital donors.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/10/the-real-covid-nursing-home-scandal-is-why-cuomo-and-other-democrats-did-it/