- GNYHA Secures Immunity for Hospitals and Workers from Liability in Connection with COVID-19
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The Greater New York Hospital Group (GNYHG) is a health care industry lobby whose members include hospitals and nursing home operators. The GNYHG issued a press release proclaiming it had successfully negotiated a deal with the Cuomo administration that would shield its members from lawsuits related to the COVID deaths of patients and residents. Here is the text of what the group's CEO, Kenneth E. Raske, and its Chief Legal Officer, Laura Alfredo, communicated:
I am very pleased to report that the Emergency Disaster Treatment Protection Act is included in the State fiscal year 2021 final budget. GNYHA drafted and aggressively advocated for this legislation. You and your heroic workers have enough to agonize over without having to worry about liability for decisions and actions made under extraordinarily challenging circumstances.
We are deeply grateful to Governor Cuomo and the Legislature for hearing our concerns and working with us so effectively. Once this legislation is enacted into law, we will have collectively eased at least part of your frontline health care workers’ massive challenges.
The bill grants qualified immunity to hospitals, nursing homes, administrators, board members, physicians, nurses, and many other providers from civil and criminal liability arising from decisions, acts, and omissions occurring from the beginning of the Governor’s emergency declaration on March 7 through its expiration, and covers liability stemming from the care of individuals with and without COVID-19.
The immunity will not apply to intentional criminal misconduct, gross negligence, and other such acts but makes clear that acts, omissions, and decisions resulting from a resource or staffing shortage will be covered. The immunity will apply where the liability arises from harm or damages in connection with providing treatment that was impacted by a facility's or professional's decisions or activities in response to or as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak and in support of the State’s directives.
This press release was issued eight days after the Cuomo administration's issued its deadly 25 March 2020 directive forcing nursing homes to admit COVID-19 patients discharged from hospitals without any testing to determine if they might still be contagious.
That timing means the influential lobbying group were awarded with legal immunity from patient and resident COVID deaths within one week of the deadly directive going into effect. To put that in perspective, the median time from initial exposure to death for COVID-19 is about 17 days, so they scored the immunity deal about 10 days before any infectious patients dumped from hospitals into nursing homes might contribute to the deaths of nursing home residents who had no previous exposure.
Note: We inserted this article into the timeline on 18 March 2021, thanks to the intrepid reporting of Josefa Velasquez of The City, who broke the story the FBI was specifically investigating how the GNYHG's prized legal immunity from COVID deaths made its way into the New York state budget. Previously, the earliest entry in the timeline related to Governor Cuomo's COVID legal immunity deal with the hospital and nursing home lobby group was on 3 May 2020.
