Quote:New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who signed legislation granting hospital and nursing home executives immunity from lawsuits related to the novel coronavirus last month, previously received a big-money boost from a powerful health care industry group, according to a new report.

An article published on the socialist website Jacobin, and re-published by The Guardian, reports that the New York State Democratic Committee, then backing Cuomo’s primary run in 2018, received more than $1 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) -- a lobbying group for hospital systems, some of which own nursing homes.

The donation made the group one of the state party’s largest contributors in that cycle. Three of the hospital association’s top officials separately gave more than $150,000 to Cuomo’s campaign between 2015 and 2018, the outlet reported.

That donation is now drawing scrutiny after Cuomo signed legislation last month that protects executives from lawsuits -- just as he is under continued criticism for his March 25 order (since deleted) requiring nursing homes to take in COVID-19 patients.

On May 10, and amid increasing criticism, Cuomo issued a new directive stating that hospitals cannot send patients back to nursing homes in the state unless they tested negative for the virus.

The budget provision says that officials “shall have immunity from any liability, civil or criminal, for any harm or damages alleged to have been sustained as a result of an act or omission in the course of arranging for or providing healthcare services” to deal with the outbreak.

The article reports that critics are now trying to repeal that provision amid concerns that it removed a deterrent against nursing homes and hospital corporations cutting corners in the treatment of coronavirus patients. But the measures were drafted and aggressively advocated for by the group, the outlet says.

Cuomo’s office responded to the report in a statement to The Guardian, saying that the measure was to protect health care workers during a national crisis. In Washington, Republicans similarly have sought to include broad liability protection for businesses in any future round of relief legislation.

“This pandemic remains an unprecedented public health crisis and we had to realign New York’s entire healthcare system, using every type of facility to prepare for the surge, and recruiting more than 96,000 volunteers – 25,000 from out of state, to help fight this virus,” said Cuomo’s senior adviser Rich Azzopardi. “These volunteers are good samaritans and what was passed by 111 members of the legislature was an expansion of the existing Good Samaritan Law to apply to the emergency that coronavirus created. If we had not done this, these volunteers wouldn’t have been accepted and we never would have had enough frontline healthcare workers.”

“This law was intended to increase capacity and provide quality care, and any suggestion otherwise is simply outrageous,” he said.

The article, featured on a major socialist website, marks pressure not only from conservative critics but also those on Cuomo’s left -- even after he had initially received glowing praise for his performance in press conferences by media outlets.

A scathing Associated Press report out Friday was highly critical of the way in which Cuomo had handled the state’s nursing home coronavirus crisis. It found more than 4,300 coronavirus-infected elderly patients were sent to vulnerable nursing homes.

Cuomo and his administration have tried to deflect that criticism, saying it was following guidelines issued by the Trump administration.

The guidelines say a nursing home "can accept a resident diagnosed with COVID-19 ... as long as the facility can follow CDC guidance." The guidance also says "nursing homes should admit any individuals that they would normally admit to their facility, including individuals from hospitals where a case of COVID-19 was/is present."

"Not could. Should," Melissa DeRosa, secretary to the governor and Cuomo's top aide, said at a Saturday press conference. "That is President Trump's CMS and CDC...There are over a dozen states that did the exact same thing."

Nursing care facilities, home to some of the most vulnerable citizens, have been coronavirus hotspots around the country. New York leads the nation with the most reported coronavirus nursing home deaths at more than 5,000 -- though the state changed how it counts deaths so the number of nursing home patient deaths could be even higher.

Link

This is ALL on Cuomo. He was the one who forced nursing homes to accept infected people so they could kill other people. No nursing home would purposefully expose other residents or staff to a fatal infection, as they are not in the business of killing their residents.

It's the STATE of NY that was negligent to the point of reckless endangerment of its most vulnerable citizens.

Cuomo and his health commissioner should spend the rest of their miserable lives in prison for this.

ya don't say...

there's only one way...be it, take 'em down or play the game...

#FKNY and their self induced overtaxed/inflated USD self importance..

Cuomo should be in jail, but he never will be.

Stink where ya been bud?

Cuomo stated that old people are going to die and we should just accept that. Its like he was justifying putting Covid patients in nursing homes because the people who it would negatively affect were already old and could die at any time.

welcome to American politics

(05-28-2020 12:27 PM)stinkfist Wrote:  ya don't say...

there's only one way...be it, take 'em down or play the game...

#FKNY and their self induced overtaxed/inflated USD self importance..

What ^ he said. And no federal bailouts for them or any of the other dem states that were already in debt bigtime due to their wasting $$ on social justice measures and policies or handing out $$ to illegal aliens.

(05-28-2020 12:43 PM)gdunn Wrote:  Stink where ya been bud?

sweatin' muh cods off in the field..

#makingBank

toss in I've long been sick of the Karens, and it simply becomes tiring...

I'm always lurking, pal....a lot on my plate lately..

He's furiously trying to avoid responsibility for his order (which has been scrubbed off the state website) to put covid patients in nursing homes. Now, he's blaming the nursing homes!! That takes some stones to even attempt as even the dumb that pay attention know that Cuomo owns it.

It's THEIR fault for allowing patients to come into the nursing homes after being ordered by HIM to take them. The people of NY have only themselves to blame for voting for this mediocre miscreant.

Heather MacDonald has a great takedown of Cuomo. He claims to be a man that makes decisions based on science. Then she gives examples and shows how they are NOT based on science.

Quote:Naturally, Cuomo the triumphant: “The secret of our success has been communications and transparency”—with success being defined, apparently, by having nearly one-third of all coronavirus deaths in the country.

Cuomo the leader who is too comfortable in his own skin to mess around with false modesty: “People said you’re being too aggressive in setting testing goals. What can I say? It’s who I am.”

And then there’s Cuomo, the inspirational: “I talk about New York tough. . . . Yes, New Yorkers are tough, and we’ve shown how tough we are here. Tough means many things, as I’ve said, loving and disciplined, et cetera. But even tough is tough. Yeah, tough is about courage”—courage defined as staying home, wearing a mask at all times, and not protesting the ongoing evisceration of livelihoods and future opportunity, or, if you are a politician, declaring yourself “essential” and collecting your full salary while millions of small businessmen lose their livings.

But the most frequent Cuomo over the last several weeks is Cuomo, the objective man of science, guided not by prejudice or preconceptions but by data and facts: “Don’t act because ‘I feel this, I feel that.’ . . . Forget the anecdotal, forget the atmospheric, forget the environmental, forget the emotional. Look at the data. Look at the measurements. Look at the science. Follow the facts,” he advised on May 18. “This is about facts and science and data. These decisions are being made as a matter of math. It’s numbers, it’s math . . . At a time of such division and politics and elections and all this garbage, this is an exercise in science and math.”

Quote:Men of science reconsider their assumptions when evidence contradicts them. Not this man of science. On April 13, Cuomo stressed that the key to staying safe was barricading oneself indoors with one’s family: “If you isolate, if you take the precautions, your family won’t get infected.” On May 5, the state discovered the “shocking” news, in Cuomo’s words, that 66 percent of new hospital admissions had been people who were sheltering at home with their families, instead of being out and about and commuting to work.

This finding should not have been “shocking.” Ample data from China and Italy already showed that most transmissions are intrafamilial. It has also long been clear from the evidence that the risk of outdoor transmission is virtually zero. One study of 7,300 cases in China found one instance of outdoor transmission between two people talking to each other, or .01 percent of all cases. Infection depends on what Japan calls the three Cs: confined spaces, crowded places, and close contact.

Quote:Politics and leadership are about making prudential decisions that require trade-offs among competing interests. The public handling of the coronavirus pandemic has been a policy disaster of unprecedented proportions that wiped out trillions of dollars of wealth and human capital almost overnight. None of those pandemic decisions were dictated by science; they were choices that incorporated a host of unspoken assumptions about the world, especially about the ability of the government to replace private economic activity.

Up to two-thirds of people who will die of COVID-19 this year would have died of another cause by the end of 2020 anyway, according to the Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson. Science has no answer for how to balance the value of prolonging their lives against the value of the lives that have been and will be lost because of deferred medical care and unemployment-induced poverty and despair. Science has no answer to the question of how to balance the value of averted COVID-19 deaths against the destruction of opportunity for hundreds of millions of young adults and low-income workers. Cuomo can try to hide behind “science,” but every day he is making an implicit trade-off between one set of interests and another, and affirmatively choosing to prolong the lockdown.

Cuomo is thus responsible (along with New York Mayor Bill De Blasio and other New York politicians) for the daily-diminishing chance that New York City will recover from its deliberately induced coma.

However much past policy decisions were taken in good faith, they must now be reversed for the sake of human life. To dodge political accountability by invoking science is not leadership, it is cowardice.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/28/cuomo...whatfinger

Only in America could somebody as mediocre as him get elected Governor but we all know that it was family ties to a leftwing political dynasty that got him there. Will he pay a price for his incompetence? Doubtful in NY.