Is one question Dem NY Assemblyman Ron Kim asks in an op-ed in the Guardian. Another is “Was the corporate immunity linked to $1.5m in political contributions from lobbyists?” Kim explains how he finds himself calling out Cuomo and calling for investigations alongside AOC.
Imagine fielding hundreds of calls from worried constituents at the peak of the first Covid-19 wave, trying to help scared families protect loved ones in nursing homes.
Imagine being stonewalled by those nursing homes and the department of health as you sought answers to life-and-death questions, knowing that Governor Andrew Cuomo’s directive forced these unprepared facilities to take in thousands of Covid-positive patients.
This was what I was going through as a New York state assemblyman when I received a call from a New York Times reporter about a corporate legal immunity provision that gave for-profit nursing homes and hospitals get-out-of-jail-free cards.
Following up on constituents complaints Kim did his job only to be undermined by Cuomo.
At the time, New York’s nursing home fatalities were among the highest in the nation. As my office began investigating, what became certain was a clear connection between early blanket corporate immunity and higher rates of fatalities at nursing homes.
I felt as if I had to make this public: we believed in our data, compiled three reports and drafted a bill to fully repeal the corporate immunity law.
However, shortly after our reports were published, the governor’s administration changed how fatalities were being counted. Nursing home residents who died in hospitals were now attributed to the hospitals and not the nursing homes. As a result, New York’s nursing home deaths “decreased” and no longer seemed as awful compared with other states.
He explains where immunity for the nursing home industry came from.
During the peak of the first wave, the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA), a lobbying arm of hospitals and nursing home facilities, drafted immunity legislation and sent it to the governor’s office. On 3 April, they bragged in a post on its website (later taken down) that they had drafted and passed the “gold standard” of legal immunity for their members in New York’s 2020 budget.
And how the industry paid for immunity.
There is a strong link between Governor Cuomo’s push for legal immunity and lobbyists like the Greater New York Hospital Association, which in one year gave him more than $1.5m in political contributions.
And concludes.
For these reasons, we must thoroughly investigate why Governor Cuomo gave these for-profit facilities legal immunity, and who influenced him to suppress the nursing home death numbers.
The immunity, the contributions and the coverup of the true death toll in nursing homes is disturbing and has AOC saying “I … stand with our local officials calling for a full investigation of the Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing homes during Covid-19,”
I’ll admit as a New Yorker I’ve never been a fan of Cuomo. He has aligned with republicans in the state senate to undermine democratic majorities and consistently worked against the progressives in our party. There are many reasons he has been called Governor 1 Percent.
That said the issue of money and politics in NY state, Cuomo was called the $100 million man, is as bad as anywhere in the nation and Cuomo not only swims in the campaign finance swamp he is also undermining reforms.
Cuomo may have followed America’s Mayor’s playbook for taking advantage of a disaster but, for me, the nursing home fiasco is the last straw. NY needs a true progressive democrat like Zepher Teachout, who literally wrote the book on corruption in America for governor.