3 May 2020: Cuomo Gifts Immunity to Nursing Home Operators

Faced with 20,000 dead, care homes seek shield from lawsuits

This article looks at the lobbying effort nursing homes have launched to protect themselves from lawsuits related to the coronavirus deaths they have incurred, which total nearly a third of all deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the U.S. The portions of the article that address New York are telling:

At least 15 states have enacted laws or governors’ orders that explicitly or apparently provide nursing homes and long-term care facilities some protection from lawsuits arising from the crisis. And in the case of New York, which leads the nation in deaths in such facilities, a lobbying group wrote the first draft of a measure that apparently makes it the only state with specific protection from both civil lawsuits and criminal prosecution.

Why is New York so different in protecting nursing homes from criminal prosecution? The article goes on to describe Governor Cuomo's relationship with the nursing home industry after describing the efforts of the industry to gain immunity protections in recent years, which looks like the industry's lobbyists have been actively engaged in providing funds to support the governor's political priorities:

Nowhere have the industry’s efforts played out more starkly than in New York, which has a fifth of the nation’s known nursing home and long-term care deaths and has had at least seven facilities with outbreaks of 40 deaths or more, including one home in Manhattan that reported 98.

New York's immunity law signed by Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo was drafted by the Greater New York Hospital Association, an influential lobbying group for both hospitals and nursing homes that donated more than $1 million to the state Democratic Party in 2018 and has pumped more than $7 million into lobbying over the past three years.

New York's immunity law, the Emergency Disaster Treatment Protection Act (EDTPA), was enacted on 20 April 2020, just as New York's coronavirus nursing home scandal began blowing up in the news. Since New York is uniquely alone in the nation at this point in shielding nursing home operators from prosecution for coronavirus-related deaths resulting from criminal negligence, it looks like the industry lobbyists have successfully used the additional leverage that the Cuomo administration's scandalous actions have provided them to get something they haven't been able to get elsewhere.

Since New York wasn't the only state that allowed the practice, it will be interesting to see what happens on this count in the others, such as New Jersey and California.