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A group of Democrats in the State Senate – fed up with Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s management of retirement homes during the COVID-19 pandemic – brought forward bills on Tuesday that would strengthen accountability and oversight of facilities as well as the state health department.
The decision by the Legislative Health Committee to approve bills for a full Senate vote comes amid a nursing home crisis in the state that has seen nearly 15,000 residents die from disease and Cuomo and Health Commissioner Howard Zucker raked the coals for trying to keep this issue from the public.
Critics of Cuomo accuse his administration of causing deaths by forcing residents of nursing homes hospitalized with COVID-19 to be discharged to vulnerable facilities amid a shortage of hospital beds – then for having underreported coronavirus deaths linked to long-term care facilities.
State Senator Gustavo Rivera (D-Bronx), chairman of the health committee, accused the Democratic governor on Tuesday of “blocking” the state legislature for months by refusing to release full numbers on the number of nursing home residents who died from the coronavirus.
Rivera said Cuomo and State Health Commissioner Howard Zucker sat on the data – until State Attorney General Letitia James at the end of last month released a report scathing accusing the administration of misleading the public by underestimating deaths by 50 percent.
“As we suspected and feared, the second floor was blocking us,” Rivera said during a virtual meeting of the public committee on the bills, referring to the governor’s office on the second floor of the Capitol building in the State in Albany.
The health department, when it reported the deaths in nursing homes, had only included the approximately 8,700 residents at the time who had died in a long-term care facility, not those who had succumbed to the virus in hospitals.
Hours after the attorney general’s report was released, Zucker began to be honest by revealing that at least 4,000 more nursing home residents had died from COVID-19 in hospitals.
Last week, an Albany judge even tore Cuomo-Zucker’s health department apart in a ruling over its inability to provide total nursing home deaths to a government watchdog group.
One of the Senate bills under consideration on Tuesday sponsored by Rivera would require the Department of Health to report the deaths of all nursing home residents, including those “who have been transferred to hospital and died in hospital ”.
The bill, if enacted, would apply retroactively to March 1, 2020, as the pandemic began in the United States.
“In order for us to develop a good policy, you need to have the right information… so that we can avoid unnecessary deaths,” said Rivera.
Lawmakers in Republican states have jumped on the bash of Cuomo.
“For the families of those who have lost loved ones in nursing homes, know that today is one more step towards responsibility – but the road is far from over,” said the head of the majority in the Senate, Rob Ortt of Lockport.
He and other GOPers are pushing for an investigation into the state’s actions by the Federal Department of Justice.
“The legislature should hold bipartisan hearings, using the subpoena power, and the Justice Department should step up its efforts to examine what happened here,” said the Assembly’s minority leader. the State, Will Barclay, of Syracuse.
Cuomo spokesman Gary Holmes responded in an email to the Post, “We said we would release additional data after our audit is complete and before the commissioner’s testimony on the budget. We do this.
“While the Auditor General’s report correctly captures the Department’s efforts to support staffing, testing, PPE and conducting inspections, it mis-entered the data, so we released what had been verified to that time to set the record straight.
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