7 June 2021: Opinion - COVID Nursing Home Deaths Are a Government Failure

Time for government – not nursing homes – to shoulder collective COVID-19 blame

In this op-ed, Brendan Williams, the president/CEO of the New Hampshire Health Care Association, says it is long past time to hold politicians and public health officials accountable for their roles in contributing to COVID deats among nursing home residents. In the following passage, he takes on New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy:

In New Jersey and New York, nursing homes were compelled to take COVID-positive hospital discharges. While New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has at least faced bipartisan condemnation over this, including a critical report from a fellow Democrat – the attorney general – New Jersey’s Senate president reneged on a pledge to form a bipartisan committee to examine how his fellow Democrat, Gov. Phil Murphy, handled nursing home care.

Confronted at one press conference about nursing home deaths, even as he sought to protect golfers from COVID-19 through restrictions, Murphy simply blamed providers, stating, “The uneven performance of this industry is jaw-dropping, and that’s as charitable as I can get.”

Yet it was an order from Murphy’s own administration that stated: “Post-acute care facilities are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized patient/resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.” Nor was “a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19” grounds to deny admission.

Is it too much to expect contrition, if not accountability?

Williams doesn't stop his criticism there, returning to Governor Cuomo's malfeasance after discussing how Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf at least acknowledged some responsibility for the spread of COVID in his state.

In Pennsylvania, the state’s Democratic auditor general reported that the state-run nursing home for veterans, which suffered terrible losses due to the virus, was run negligently. An independent investigative report commissioned by Gov. Tom Wolf confirmed those findings and acknowledged “misjudgments and lost opportunities in controlling and limiting the spread of the virus.”

Here at least blame over government actions was assigned, as opposed to a well-massaged, farcical report Cuomo’s administration had issued – reportedly “rewritten several times by senior advisers to Mr. Cuomo” – that deflected all blame for nursing home deaths.

Williams identifies partisan politics as the reason for Governor Cuomo's seemingly "favorable" public polling:

Last month, a Sienna College poll found 50% of New Yorkers felt Gov. Cuomo did at least a “fair” job of “[m]aking public all data about COVID-related deaths of nursing home patients” – when, in fact, all reporting shows his administration assiduously concealed that information. And as is, sadly, true of everything these days, respondents perceived the answer through a partisan lens: Only 33% of Democrats felt Cuomo had done a “poor” job, with 41% thinking it was no less than “good.”

It would be interesting to see the results of a poll asking New Yorkers what percentage of deaths from other conditions are acceptable for state officials to conceal from lawmakers and the public.