24 January 2022: Hochul Budget Offers No Settlement for Victims of Cuomo's COVID Nursing Home Deaths Scandals

Nursing home families blast Hochul for excluding victims fund in state budget

This report indicates something big is missing from replacement NY governor Kathy Hochul's budget proposal for the upcoming fiscal year.

Family members who lost loved ones in nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic slammed Gov. Kathy Hochul for failing to include a $4 billion victims compensation fund in her $216.3 billion state budget.

“We believe the victims compensation fund should be included in the budget as a final admission of guilt. That will give the families closure and some sense of accountability,” said Vivian Zayas, who lost her 78-year-old mother, Ana Martinez in a Long Island nursing home in April 2020.

Initially proposed last year by state Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Queens), the 9/11-style Nursing Home Victims Compensation Fund would earmark $4 billion to families whose relatives died amid the state’s nursing home debacle at the start of the pandemic.

The next excerpt reveals the surviving members of the families are not taking Hochul's glaring budget omission very well:

Brett Leitner, Zayas’ lawyer, blasted Hochul for not following through.

“The former governor took millions of dollars in donations from the millionaire nursing home owners, gave those friends blanket protection for their negligence which led to 15,000 deaths, and then tried to hide those deaths from the public,” said Leitner – referencing the past donations Cuomo’s campaign had received from the healthcare industry.

“In what appeared to be a change from the usual ‘pay-for-play’ tactics of the former administration, a few months ago, Gov. Hochul offered a formal apology to the victims’ families for the pain the former governor caused, and pledged in effect to do right by them.

“It appears this was an empty promise.”

Finally, Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Queens), who introduced a bill proposing the fund, points his finger at the difference between how New Jersey and New York are addressing the same problem with a nearly identical cause:

“I think it’s embarrassing because New Jersey already settled with the veteran nursing home families and we should be leading the country in making the families and nursing homes whole — especially because we had private conversations with [Hochul] last year,” he said.

The settlement in New Jersey applies only to two nursing homes for veterans that were run by New Jersey's state government. It does not apply to the privately-run nursing homes that were compelled by Governor Phil Murphy's version of Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive to accept COVID-positive patients being dumped out of the state's hospitals to free up their bed space. The deaths that resulted from the Murphy administration's own deadly directive have yet to be settled.

Altogether, this report presents more evidence to support the hypothesis New York's Democratic party politicians are seeking to protect their own political interests and hold on power by dropping probes into Andrew M. Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals.