10 March 2021: A Fiscal Motive for Hospitals Dumping of COVID Patients Into Nursing Homes?

The Real COVID Nursing Home Scandal Is Why Cuomo And Other Democrats Did It

This article explores a fiscal motive that Governor Cuomo and at least three other state governors may have had for continuing their policies of forcing nursing homes to admit potentially contagious COVID-19 patients without testing even after hospital in their states had sufficient capacity to treat COVID patients after their early surges.

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.

While the fiscal benefits theory could explain why the forced COVID patient nursing home admission policies continued, it doesn't explain why they started. Here, the panic of Governor Cuomo and top officials in his administration explains why they started such a policy they believed would have negative consequences, as they feared negative publicity from their hospitals becoming overwhelmed.

Believe it or not, Governor Cuomo was the second governor to put such a questionable policy in place. Pennsylvania's Governor Thomas Wolf was the first, following the guidance of his state health department director, Rachel Levine, who has since been nominated to be the Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Biden administration.