The answer to the question, ‘Why?’ is the proverbial elephant in the room. The sexual harassment allegations against Governor Andrew Cuomo, the misreporting of the actual number of nursing home deaths, and the fact that Cuomo is a pompous overbearing jerk are each being thrown in the public’s face to hide the answer to the million-dollar question, as reported on The Federalist.
The real scandal is what lies behind the high number of 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.
The high number of nursing home deaths were the direct result of policies that quickly discharged elderly or disabled COVID-19 patients from the hospital when they were still COVID-positive and then put them back in group or nursing homes. The hospital lobby directly engineered this approach, and these governors obliged.
The reason passed out for public consumption 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 high number of patients 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.
The GNYHA is “one of the most influential forces in New York politics.” Cuomo received $1 million from GNYHA in his reelection campaign, and the donation was engineered to remain secret until after his inauguration. Overall, during Cuomo’s second term his campaign and his state party committee raked in more than $2.3 million from hospital donors.
Now, we see that the attacks on Cuomo about sexual harassment are beyond coincidental.
Certainly, this behavior deserves investigation and condemnation. Yet one might notice that it hides the true story — swampy far-left Democrat governors tied to the all-powerful health-care lobby.
The media seems to be obsessing over the charge of sexual harassment, but this merely is a cover for the remaining illegalities. This leaves us with four takeaways, according to The Federalist.
First, the nation’s high-profile leftist governors put hospital profit ahead of the most vulnerable. For all progressivism’s platitudes, it was all about the money in the end. This is naked, quid pro quo corruption: You finance my campaign, I offload your sick patients who don’t pay.
Second, this is an easy story to tell the American people: “Hospitals don’t make money on poor and elderly COVID-19 patients, so they pushed Democrat governors to have these patients placed back in nursing and group homes too soon, which made nursing and group homes hubs for COVID-19 deaths.”
The final takeaway is that this story tells us a lot about the overall failures of our health-care system, which neither party is willing to address. That’s worth a whole separate article, if not entire books, yet it suffices to say that this is yet another issue on which our political discourse fails to get to the heart of the matter and fix real problems faced by the American people.
Killing grandma and grandpa due to profit margin is evil and, of course, sad, but what may very well become additionally painful for the families and loved ones of the deceased, the United States Justice system, I can see, not choosing to prosecute any of the people responsible, let alone not properly dealing with every damn one of them.
