14 April 2021: "An Overlooked Wrinkle"

Despite Pandemic Carnage, Predatory Nursing Home Financiers Keep Thriving

This article is generally critical of the nursing home industry, but does point at a unique relationship that may have influenced Governor Cuomo's 2 April 2020 decision to gift legal immunity for COVID deaths to a powerful hospital and nursing home operator lobby.

As Politico pointed out last May as statehouses rushed to pass copycat versions of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s liability shield into law, nursing homes are “one of the lobbying world’s quiet powerhouses.” Indeed, one overlooked wrinkle in the saga of the New York governor’s baffling decision to pour gasoline on the nursing home holocaust by forcing homes to accept COVID patients in exchange for a wrongful-death lawsuit moratorium is the role that might have been played by a longtime nursing home lobbyist named Jeffrey A. Sachs, who ran Cuomo’s Medicaid modernization commission in 2011, aggressively promoted Landau’s $72 million nursing home flip in 2015, and happens to be the governor’s lifelong best friend. Like Landau, Sachs has shrewdly kept his name out of the papers since the Rivington House flip, but his consultancy the Sachs Policy Group has been lobbying up a storm, producing more than 100 regular COVID-19 policy newsletters for clients since the pandemic began.

The article also explains why the hospital and nursing home operators' lobby has a reason to be so politically connected:

Part of the problem is that the nursing home industry is fragmented and difficult to understand; the other part is that it is, like any industry that relies almost wholly on government funding, extraordinarily powerful.

Institutions that develop dependence upon government funding are uniquely corrupt. The politicians that deliver funding know that. They also benefit from it. It's just a different version of the book deals politicians get.