Tuesday, March 30, 2021

30 March 2021: Hospital and Nursing Home Lobbyists Upset at Losing Cuomo's Gift of COVID Legal Immunity

Health care industry's pandemic-era legal shields poised for repeal

This report covers the reaction of the lobbyists of the Greater New York Hospital Group, who leveraged the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive into a gift of legal immunity for COVID deaths on 2 April 2020. As you'll see in the excerpted section below, they've turned to fearmongering to try to preserve their special protections:

Legislation nixing broad legal protections for health care providers during the pandemic stands ready to become law after receiving the approval of veto-proof majorities in the Assembly and state Senate. The vote drew the condemnation of health care and nursing home industry representatives, who called the move premature.

"What if the variants do something unexpected? What happens if something goes awry in the near future?" asked Southern New York Association President Neil Heyman, whose group represents long-term-care facilities in New York City, Long Island and Westchester. "I think people should still be protected until we reach herd immunity and this thing is gone."

The provisions were drafted by the Greater New York Hospital Association and became law as part of the budget passed last spring, as the Emergency or Disaster Treatment Protection Act. The law shields health care providers and their facilities from civil or criminal liability for incidents related to care they provide during the pandemic, as long as they act in good faith. The protections do not apply to willful or intentional criminal conduct, recklessness or gross negligence.

Here's more background from the timeline:

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