30 September 2021: NY Lawmakers Want $4B Fund to Compensate COVID Nursing Home Victims

NY lawmakers seek to create $4B nursing home victims compensation fund

How much are the lives of the residents who died after being exposed to COVID as a result of the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive during the period it was in effect? This report indicates New York legislators are setting up a $4 billion fund to compensate the victims' families for their deaths.

State lawmakers want to set up a massive $4 billion nursing home victims compensation fund aimed at providing fiscal relief for the thousands of families whose relatives died after contracting COVID-19 in nursing homes.

The legislation — sponsored by state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi (D-The Bronx) and Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Queens) — will allow families to submit applications to a nursing home victims compensation board and receive payments from the state.

The bill is modeled after the Sept. 11 Victims Compensation Fund to provide aid to victims of the terror attacks, including those with medical conditions from breathing the toxic stew from the collapsing World Trade Center towers.

Families will be eligible for a minimum payout of $250,000 for every loved one who died of the virus, and spouses and dependents will each be able to receive a minimum payment of $100,000, Kim said.

“The Justice for Nursing Home Victims Act will make it very expensive for our state and the nursing home industry to commit eldercide. At the peak of the pandemic, it is abundantly clear that our state government’s only motivating factor was protecting industry profits over people’s lives,” said Kim.

Setting up this fund is all but saying the policies of the Cuomo administration are responsible for contributing to the COVID deaths of nursing home residents. Their actions to force nursing homes to admit COVID patients being dumped out of hospitals to free up hospital beds and to block nursing homes from testing those patients to see if their coronavirus infections were still contagious bear responsibility for excess COVID deaths among New York's elderly population. Meanwhile, Andrew M. Cuomo's gift of legal immunity to hospital and nursing home operators for COVID deaths constitutes what Kim describes as "protecting industry profits".

We think it was inevitable given the nature of Andrew M Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals that the state government would be held liable for COVID deaths attributable to the Cuomo administration's policies. The proposal discussed in this report is an opening bid for setting a monetary value on the lives that were lost.