Wednesday marks 1,099 days since the Cuomo administration ordered COVID-positive nursing-home patients back into unprepared facilities.
The erasure of this fatal mandate from our state’s pandemic history is one of Albany’s most egregious and nauseating acts.
Families who lost loved ones meet this time of year with anger, frustration, hurt and disappointment. How could they not?
March is a slow-moving month of hell because their nearest and dearest were caught up in New York’s deadliest policy mistake and no one will acknowledge it.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order March 25, 2020, to move COVID-positive patients from hospitals into nursing homes.
Thousands of unnecessary deaths followed his deadly decision.
The order remained in place 60 days as his administration ignored protests from lawmakers watching the massacre play out.
But this story is bigger than the families fighting for accountability.
Knowing how life-and-death decisions got made during a pandemic is a matter of public interest.
Were officials really focused on “following the science”? Or were they more concerned with carefully curating their reputation and procuring lucrative government contracts?
Our Legislature has not made any serious attempts at accountability for the numerous mistakes in our pandemic response.
We don’t have clarity on how personal-protective-equipment contracts were handled, how testing was procured or who drafted the deadly March 25 order and why.
We could be months away from another pandemic, and I assure you, we are no closer to being ready for the next one.
How scientific information is handled is at the heart of this inquiry.
If our leaders were found to have made decisions based on politics, not science, there must be consequences.
New Yorkers should look at how the United Kingdom is handling the actions of its former health secretary.
Matt Hancock is being investigated as part of a public inquiry and could face criminal-negligence charges after the High Court ruled that mandating untested, COVID-positive patients back into nursing homes was illegal.
Our leaders are a planet’s distance away from acknowledging such mistakes and continue to be bribed by the worst corporate actors in the hospital and nursing-home industries.
Politicians do the hospital lobby’s bidding by obfuscating and covering up the real toll of the March 25 order and gaslighting families.
Remember this Cuomo gem? “Who cares [if they] died in the hospital, died in a nursing home? They died.”
Here’s what I believe: There was never a plan for older adults.
Our elders were always going to be collateral damage, and that won’t change without someone being held accountable.
I want to draw your attention to a little-known nonprofit, Health Research Inc., that operates parallel to the Department of Health. Incorporated in 1953, HRI started as a state-government contractor.
Ballooning to 2,000 employees, it now overlaps with the Department of Health and receives $800 million from taxpayers every year.
It has tremendous power, and its president, the DOH commissioner, even draws extra income from HRI.
HRI does not answer to lawmakers, and its budget is not subject to approval or review by our Legislature.
We don’t even have a full picture of its spending in our state financial documents.
HRI and DOH have known since 2014 — as paperwork indicates — that hospitals and nursing homes would surge with patients in a health emergency.
And still we abandoned our elders.
The public deserve to know what part of HRI’s plans included intentionally spreading a deadly virus to the most vulnerable population.
The new administration has been in lockstep with the nursing-home industry since coming into office.
Though she wouldn’t commit to a full investigation, my greatest hope was for our new governor to sign the Grieving Families Act.
The bill would have updated the wrongful-death statute that’s been untouched for 176 years.
New York’s wrongful-death claims have been settled in strict pecuniary terms — financial losses — that unjustly ignore emotional damages and other forms of loss.
For thousands of nursing-home families whose lives were destroyed during the pandemic, this would have been a game-changer.
They would have been able to seek redress in the courts for their pain and suffering.
Unbelievably — or not — Gov. Kathy Hochul bowed to industry pressure and vetoed the bill, leaving behind grieving nursing-home families once again.
As a policymaker, you want to believe you have the ability to change things.
That if you’re drafting laws in a broken place it will become less broken as a result of your efforts.
But I fear this hope is slipping away because of cases like this — because we may never know what led to the March 25 order.
But I implore you to demand our lawmakers and elected officials start trying.
Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Democrat, represents New York’s 40th District.
