The real COVID nursing home scandal is why Cuomo and other Democrats did it | Eastern North Carolina Now

Amid Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s sexual harassment allegations, and the scandal over his administration hiding the disgustingly high number of nursing home and group home deaths, few are talking about the elephant in the room. The big scandal isn’t that Cuomo is a creep, because everyone knew that already. The scandal isn’t even that Cuomo lied about nursing home deaths.

The real scandal is what lay behind the high nursing home deaths in New York and a handful of other states led by leftist governors such as Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Minnesota’s Tim Walz, and Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf. It is the story of how grandpa and grandma got tossed aside for money.

The stated reason for the policy was concern about hospital capacity, but these states kept the policy well after COVID hospitalizations peaked in April. In states like Minnesota, the policy remained in place even though the health-care system never faced the strain that was initially feared. What you don’t hear is that hospitals didn’t want to keep Medicare and Medicaid patients (especially Medicaid patients) in hospitals for too long, because longer stays with such patients are less profitable.

In New York, Michigan, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, nursing homes were required or encouraged to admit COVID-positive patients. The COVID-positive patients then spread the disease to the rest of the residents, and group and nursing homes became epicenters for COVID-19 cases and deaths. Leftists try to brush this logic aside, but a report found a direct correlation between patients discharged by hospitals and COVID-19 cases.

In Cuomo’s New York, at the height of the pandemic on March 25, the State Health Department “compelled nursing homes to accept patients who had tested positive for coronavirus.” The policy was pushed by the non-profit hospital association, the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA). New York had recently cut Medicaid funding due to budget issues, and given Medicaid is already chronically underfunded, it is possible that hospitals were losing money or at best barely breaking even on poor and indigent COVID-19 patients.

Click here to read the rest of the article:  The Real Nursing Home Scandal Is Why Cuomo, Other Democrats Did It (thefederalist.com)

Hat tip to Carole Gunn for sending us this link.