Thursday, April 15, 2021

15 April 2021: Ron Kim on Holding Nursing Homes Accountable and the Origins of Governor Cuomo's Cover-up

Ron Kim on nursing home immunity repeal: It was critical 'to hold these facilities accountable'

This interview with NY Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Queens) discusses some of the background behind what motivated his legislation to repeal the COVID legal immunity gifted to a powerful hospital and nursing home lobby on 2 April 2020 by Governor Cuomo.

"Exactly a year ago the governor relied on his top lobbyists that represented the special interests of hospitals and nursing homes to sneak into the budget of a 5,000 page document of a near blanket corporate immunity for the top executives," Kim explained on Hill.TV's "Rising."

"Now as you can imagine, when you're giving out this type of corporate immunity to some of the worst nursing homes it serves as a disincentive for these businesses from investing further into PPE or hiring more staff," Kim continued. "So it was critical for us to repeal it, to go the other direction to hold these facilities accountable, to direct them to invest more."

Kim said that while other lawmakers and the media in other parts of the country shone a light on the flaws of the bill and prevented it from passing, a lack of transparency allowed it to pass in New York.

"In places like Albany and other capitals there wasn't that much transparency and accountability. So they were able to put it through with the powerful executive like Andrew Cuomo who was on CNN and all these other mainstream media every night pretending that he was serving the public but when you look at the policies that he was putting together he was protecting the corporate interest over people's lives," Kim said.

That's only part of the story. In truth, the member organizations of the lobby that sought and received the commitment to provide legal immunity from Governor Cuomo had to know the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive would unleash a torrent of deaths within New York's nursing homes. They leveraged that knowledge over Governor Cuomo, who knew that would be a consequence of the policy well before he committed to push through legal immunity for nursing home operators.

In this sense, that arrangement marks the beginning of Governor Cuomo's attempted cover-up of the full extent of COVID-related deaths of New York nursing home residents. Without the compensation of legal immunity for COVID deaths of patients in their care, there's little question nursing home operators would have been very vocal about the Cuomo administration's 25 March 2020 directive. Governor Cuomo would benefit from avoiding the public discovery of the consequences of the policies he and senior officials in his administration greenlighted.

Here is related coverage from the timeline outlining these aspects of Governor Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals:

The next step will be to hold Governor Cuomo and the members of his administration who implemented and enforced the 25 March 2020 directive accountable for the consequences of the 25 March 2020 directive that they clearly anticipated.

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