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The Justice Department’s inquiry remains open; however, the status of the investigation is unclear under the new Biden administration. This month, Pennsylvania Republicans announced an investigation into Democratic Gov. Tom Wolfe’s administration handling of the state’s nursing home policy. Days before Dr. Levine signed her nursing home directive, she took her 95-year-old mother out of a personal care home, after she was notified of residents nearby who tested positive for the coronavirus. The legislature must repeal the immunity provisions Andrew Cuomo granted nursing homes and other health care facilities from liability for actions during the COVID crisis. "Now that policy differed from that of Andrew Cuomo in New York in that he required patients to be sent ... from the hospitals to the nursing homes. The governor incentivized them by paying nursing homes more to take those COVID-positive patients," Meloni continued.
Andrew Cuomo is not the only Democratic governor facing intense scrutiny over the handling of nursing homes during the coronavirus pandemic. According to inspectors, the man’s chart indicates that days after that incident, a nurse reported the police had been called to the facility several times in the previous seven days but the officers could not do anything because the man refused to let anyone search through his belongings. Those in long-term care facilities are sometimes ignored by family and at the mercy of staff that are either overworked or indifferent to their struggles. These are some of the worst cases of nursing home and elderly abuse in recent memory.
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The owners and senior managers of Cold Spring Hills Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation on Long Island created a network of shell companies to conceal the alleged fraud that siphoned Medicare and Medicaid funds that were supposed to be used for resident care, according to the attorney general's lawsuit. On April 17, and we don’t need to get too far on a tangent, but just so you guys understand part of all this. The organizationcompiled the informationand created a spreadsheet that outlines nursing home deaths by facility, county, date of death, and whether the death was in-facility or out-of-facility death, and COVID confirmed or COVID presumed. Another patient who was there for five months after a stroke said she only received three showers in that time. A man who was badly injured in a car crash lost 30 pounds as a result of the care at the rehab center, according to the attorney general, and his condition worsened during his time there.
First, the records do not fully account for the deaths of some 600 residents that occurred outside of the long-term care facilities, most often in hospitals, in which the COVID-19 diagnosis was presumed rather than confirmed. State health officials contend that asymptomatic nursing home employees, not recovering COVID-19 patients, were the driving factor in nursing home outbreaks. And they have repeatedly noted that by law, nursing homes weren’t supposed to accept anyone they couldn’t adequately care for. At issue was a policy issued in March 2020 that effectively ordered nursing homes to take back residents who had been discharged from hospitals after being treated for Covid-19. The goal was to keep virus patients from overwhelming hospitals, a step other states also took. In January, New York’s attorney general said the administration had undercounted nursing home deaths by several thousand.
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In October 1895, he was ready to begin wholeheartedly a new apprenticeship with a bookseller in Tübingen. This experience from his youth, especially his time spent at the Seminary in Maulbronn, he returns to later in his novel Beneath the Wheel. Hermann Hesse's grandfather Hermann Gundert, a doctor of philosophy and fluent in multiple languages, encouraged the boy to read widely, giving him access to his library, which was filled with the works of world literature. All this instilled a sense in Hermann Hesse that he was a citizen of the world. His family background became, he noted, "the basis of an isolation and a resistance to any sort of nationalism that so defined my life". Hesse grew up in a Swabian Pietist household, with the Pietist tendency to insulate believers into small, deeply thoughtful groups.
In March 1892, Hesse showed his rebellious character, and, in one instance, he fled from the Seminary and was found in a field a day later. Hesse began a journey through various institutions and schools and experienced intense conflicts with his parents. In May, after an attempt at suicide, he spent time at an institution in Bad Boll under the care of theologian and minister Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt. Later, he was placed in a mental institution in Stetten im Remstal, and then a boys' institution in Basel. At the end of 1892, he attended the Gymnasium in Cannstatt, now part of Stuttgart.
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James’ investigators looked at a sample of 62 of the state’s roughly 600 nursing homes. They reported 1,914 deaths of residents from COVID-19, while the state Department of Health logged only 1,229 deaths at those same facilities. One unnamed facility, for example, had an official death toll of 11 but the attorney general’s probe found that 40 had actually died. Attorney Seth DuCharme of the Eastern District of New York and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had launched an investigation into New York state's handling of nursing home deaths. The Eastern District is handling the investigation because Audrey Strauss, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, is the mother-in-law of Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa, meaning that Strauss would have to recuse herself from any involvement in the investigation.
At the time, the state’s tally only included residents who had died inside a nursing home; it excluded those who died at a hospital or other facility. Beginning last spring, Mr. Cuomo was criticized over a state requirement that forced nursing homes to take back residents who had been hospitalized with Covid-19 once they recovered. Critics said the policy had increased the number of virus-related deaths among nursing home residents. But he stopped short of a full apology for his handling of information about the death toll in the state’s nursing homes, an issue that has engulfed his administration in recent weeks. — Admitting a degree of fault for the first time, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Monday that his administration’s lack of transparency about the scope of coronavirus-related deaths in nursing homes in New York was a mistake.
But as recently as late January, the state was reporting only about 8,500 fatalities, excluding virus-related deaths that occurred physically outside of those facilities, such as in hospitals. State health officials could see from the data that a significant number of nursing home residents had died after being transferred to hospitals. But when Mr. Cuomo’s most senior aides saw the report, they rewrote it to eliminate the higher count. Cold Spring Hills was among the nursing homes found to have underreported resident deaths from the virus. However, according to James' lawsuit, the 588-bed facility in Woodbury has "a long history of insufficient staffing and poor quality of care."
On March 4, 2021, interviews and reports from The New York Times found that several of Cuomo's aides, Melissa DeRosa, Linda Lacewell and Jim Malatras had rewritten a report from state health officials to omit 9,250 COVID-19 deaths among nursing home residents. Following Attorney Genera Letitia James' January report that first exposed the cover-up, Cuomo's administration released complete data, including the nursing home deaths, and cited the possibility of a politically-motivated investigation from the Department of Justice as a justification. On January 28, 2021, New York State Attorney General Letitia James issued a report that the New York State Department of Health had undercounted the total deaths from COVID-19 within nursing homes by 50 percent. In January 2021, Attorney General of New York Letitia James released a report finding that Governor Andrew Cuomo had understated the toll of COVID-19-related deaths in state nursing homes by as much as 50 percent.
By the end of March, New York’s death toll from the outbreak surpassed 1,000. The first-known infection in the state was discovered March 1 in a health care worker who recently returned from Iran. Two days later, the state got its second case, a lawyer from the suburb of New Rochelle. Mr. Cuomo’s critics said the order had fueled the spread of the virus in nursing homes. Mr. Cuomo is now in the most turbulent period of his three terms in office, his political future clouded as New York continues to grapple with the virus and the economic toll it has taken.
The facility failed to report 51 of those deaths to the state's DOH, the lawsuit stated, a fraudulent underreporting by more than 50 percent. The new number of 9,056 recovering patients sent to hundreds of nursing homes is more than 40% higher than what the state health department previously released. And it raises new questions as to whether a March 25 directive from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration helped spread sickness and death among residents, a charge the state disputed.
The man became angry when the director of nursing “totally ignored him,” workers told inspectors. The workers said the director of nursing slammed shut the door of the resident’s room and then approached the man in his bed, yelling at him “at the top of her lungs,” almost in his face, and saying, “You do not talk to me and my staff that way,” in a threatening manner. As a result of the inspector’s findings, the Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals determined residents of the home had been placed in immediate jeopardy due to insufficient competent staff and a failure to adequately assess residents’ needs. Two state fines totaling $15,000 were proposed but held in suspension so the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services can consider taking action in the matter. In mid-September, the care facility received a lab report that indicated the man had tested positive for methamphetamine. Days later, the man was observed screaming at the staff, upset over a television that he claimed was his but which belonged to the facility.
Critics argue that Governor Andrew Cuomo's law shielding nursing home executives from lawsuits removed a deterrent to corporations cutting corners in ways that jeopardized lives. Indeed, the Cuomo administration responded to the Justice Department’s questions in writing by Sept. 9. But state health officials did not respond to the Legislature’s questions until last week. In his remarks on Monday, Mr. Cuomo echoed Ms. DeRosa’s comments — made in a private conversation with top Democrats in Albany — that the administration was concerned about the Trump Justice Department potentially pursuing a politically motivated investigation. “Why would you place COVID patients with the most vulnerable people in nursing homes?
In all, the researchers found that the deaths accounted for "about 160,000 lost life-years." Gill closed the segment by asking Meloni if Whitmer cited "any research" or "anything" that supports her assertion that her nursing home policy was the right one. Meloni told the anchor that the governor pointed to a University of Michigan study showing that nursing home deaths in her state were below the national average, as well as an AARP study that "gave her some praise." The issue for me, the biggest issue of all, is feeling like I needed to defend or at least not attack an administration that was appearing to be covering something up.
In October, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, private equity-owned nursing homes had lower supplies of personal protective equipment for their workers when compared to all other types of nursing homes. The new study—which updates the researchers' previous findings—offers clues about why private equity ownership of nursing homes has resulted in higher casualty counts. As the paper noted, private equity-owned nursing homes have lower staffing levels than their counterparts, which is directly correlated with patient outcomes. In all, 70 percent of nursing homes currently operate as for-profit businesses, far more than other healthcare facilities. The analysis found that between 2004 and 2016, more than 20,000 Americans perished as a consequence of living in nursing homes run by private equity firms. The data showed that going to a private-equity-owned nursing home significantly "increases the probability of death during the stay and the following 90 days" as compared to nursing homes with a different ownership structure.
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