Tag: New York

COVID-19: Cuomo Calls For Nursing Home Reform Amid Federal Probe, Increasing Pressure

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://dailyvoice.com/new-york/northsalem/news/covid-19-cuomo-calls-for-nursing-home-reform-amid-federal-probe-increasing-pressure/803613/

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Excerpt:

With pressure coming from both sides of the aisle into investigating New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, he has vowed sweeping reform as part of the 30-day amendments.

Cuomo announced reforms to improve the health, quality of life, and safety of nursing home residents to ensure that “facilities prioritize patient care over profits.”

“You can’t say to a nursing home that ‘either you can buy new beds, or you can make more money,’ ” Cuomo said during a COVID-19 briefing on Friday, Feb. 19. “It’s not a matter of hiring more staff or helping people or making more money.

Author(s): Zak Fallia

Publication Date: 19 February 2021

Publication Site: Daily Voice

Why the New York Stock Exchange Could Soon Flee the State

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://fee.org/articles/why-the-new-york-stock-exchange-could-soon-flee-the-state/

Excerpt:

State lawmakers in Albany, New York are considering imposing a tax on financial transactions. If they go through with it, the iconic New York Stock Exchange might actually leave the Empire State.

The tax legislation in question was recently proposed by state Senator Julia Salazar and several of her Democratic colleagues. It would impose a 0.5 percent tax on stock trades and smaller taxes on bond and derivative trades. These levies may sound minor, but they add up when applied across millions of trades—and Salazar says the tax would raise $12-29 billion in revenue. 

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“The New York Stock Exchange belongs in New York,” NYSE President Stacey Cunningham writes in a new Wall Street Journal Op-Ed. “If Albany lawmakers get their way, however, the center of the global financial industry may need to find a new home.”

“Financial transaction taxes have a dismal track record,” she continued. “They never live up to the promises about how much revenue they’ll raise. They damage capital markets and destroy high-paying jobs.” 

Author(s): Brad Polumbo

Publication Date: 11 February 2021

Publication Site: Foundation for Economic Education

Day-by-day ridership numbers

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://new.mta.info/coronavirus/ridership

Excerpt:

Updated February 18, 2021

We’re keeping this page up to date with systemwide ridership and traffic estimates for subways, buses, Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North Railroad, Access-A-Ride, and Bridges and Tunnels. You can see changes over the past seven days, as well as get a sense of how ridership and traffic differs this year versus last year. We will generally update the page on weekdays, excluding holidays, with the prior day’s figures. At times, data issues may delay the updates.

Download all the data we have published on this page.

Date Accessed: 18 February 2021

Publication Site: MTA

False Hero of the Pandemic

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.city-journal.org/cuomo-under-fire-for-hiding-nursing-home-deaths

Excerpt:

Between March 25 and May 10, 2020, an advisory from Cuomo’s Department of Health (DOH) compelled nursing homes to readmit hospitalized Covid-19 patients without checking if they still had active infection. Health experts cautioned that the policy could lead to additional deaths by introducing infected people into closed facilities where those most vulnerable to the disease—the elderly and infirm—live. Cuomo’s responses ranged from the devil—aka the Trump administration—made me do it; to we didn’t force anything—facilities had discretion to turn down admissions; to “nothing to see here”—the policy didn’t increase the number of deaths; to “who cares” where they died.

Cuomo repeatedly and falsely claimed that the policy was directed by federal guidance. A July DOH report (now revised) also claimed that the nursing-home admission policy was following federal guidance that homes “should accept residents with COVID-19.” In fact, the federal guidance was permissive, not proscriptive: “A nursing home can accept a resident diagnosed with COVID-19 . . . as long as the facility can follow CDC guidance for Transmission-Based Precautions” (emphasis added).

Author(s): Joel Zinberg

Publication Date: 16 February 2021

Publication Site: City Journal

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo under investigation for nursing home deaths

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/york-gov-andrew-cuomo-investigation-nursing-home-deaths/story?id=75960261

Excerpt:

The full scope of the investigation is not immediately clear, but the sources said there was a particular interest in nursing homes, which have been a source of increasing frustration for Cuomo.

Last week, an aide conceded the administration withheld the nursing home death toll from state lawmakers out of fear it would be used against the state by the Trump administration.

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The controversy over nursing home deaths has dogged Cuomo for months. At the onset of the pandemic, state health officials directed nursing homes to accept residents recovering from the virus as they were discharged from hospitals.

The directive was rescinded several weeks later, but Cuomo faced criticism that it contributed to a high level of deaths in nursing homes. The governor said he based the decision on federal guidance at the time and insisted staff members, not residents discharged from hospitals, brought coronavirus into nursing homes.

Author(s): Aaron Katersky

Publication Date: 17 February 2021

Publication Site: ABC News

FBI, U.S. attorney in Brooklyn probing Cuomo administration on nursing homes

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/cuomo-investigation-fbi-covid-nursing-homes-15957401.php

Excerpt:

The FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn have launched an investigation that is examining, at least in part, the actions of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s coronavirus task force in its handling of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities during the pandemic, the Times Union has learned.

The probe by the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York is apparently in its early stages and is focusing on the work of some of the senior members of the governor’s task force, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter who is not authorized to comment publicly.

Author(s): Brendan J. Lyons

Publication Date: 17 February 2021

Publication Site: Times-Union

Worst Governor In America: Those Nursing Homes Are Just Terrible, Aren’t They?

Mary Pat Campbell
Worst governor in America: Those nursing homes are just terrible, aren’t they?

Excerpt:

I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the nursing homes themselves are without blame. As soon as it became obvious that there were outbreaks of the virus in any senior facility, the administrators should have been moving to set up isolation wards and impose more rigorous disinfecting and screening protocols. Some homes did that while others clearly failed. I will also agree that having a cap of $10,000 per violation of the state’s health codes amounts to a slap on the wrist and doesn’t provide much incentive to do better.

With all of that said, however, Cuomo’s team is still completely ignoring the elephant in the room. There were nursing homes in New York at the start of the pandemic that were trying to refuse reentry to residents who tested positive for the novel coronavirus. It was Andrew Cuomo, acting under the extraordinary executive emergency powers granted to him by the state legisature that ordered all of the homes to accept returning residents and forbade them from requiring a negative COVID test as part of the process.

Cuomo also threatened non-compliant nursing homes with crippling fines or the loss of their license to operate. So while some of the nursing homes were clearly failing to take all possible precautions, even the ones who were trying to do the right thing were forbidden from doing so. There is one and only one person responsible for the subsequent deaths in those homes and that’s the person who picked up his pen and issued the orders.

Author(s): Jazz Shaw

Publication Date: 16 February 2021

Publication Site: Hot Air

Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing home deaths calls for serious investigation

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/17/opinions/cuomo-covid-nursing-home-deaths-rodgers/index.html

Excerpt:

Late last month, New York State Attorney General Letitia James issued a scathing report about how nursing homes in the state handled Covid-19, including a finding that the state’s Department of Health undercounted Covid deaths at nursing homes by approximately 50%. While the discrepancy didn’t change the overall number of New York Covid-19 deaths, it attributed deaths where a nursing home resident had been transferred to a hospital for treatment to the hospital instead of the nursing home.

This undercount (a term New York State Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker has pushed back on) downplayed the high rates of transmission at nursing homes, at a time when the state mandated that nursing homes re-admit patients with Covid-19 who had been receiving treatment in a hospital, a policy that was reversed a couple of months later. (Cuomo has long said the decision to send recovering Covid-19 patients back to nursing homes was based on federal guidance to do so.)

Last year both the US Department of Justice and New York State legislators issued requests for information about nursing home Covid statistics in New York State, but the Cuomo administration, according to a recent admission by a top Cuomo aide, delayed the release of the figures out of concern about a possible politically motivated federal investigation.

Author(s): Jennifer Rodgers

Publication Date: 17 February 2021

Publication Site: CNN

Cuomo-gate: A Nixonian Scandal Is Engulfing New York

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.dailyposter.com/p/cuomo-gate-a-nixonian-scandal-is

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Excerpt:

The Daily Poster had been covering the story for months before it exploded this week. The scandal is a cautionary tale of hubris, megalomania, and corruption that left a literal mountain of preventable COVID deaths in its wake. Now we are about to see whether a blue state’s democratic institutions can hold wrongdoers accountable, or whether America’s culture of impunity can once again protect the powerful from facing any consequences at all.

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Two national news outlets today detailed Cuomo’s new campaign of retribution against one lawmaker in his own party who dared to ask questions about constituents and family members who died under Cuomo’s nursing home policies. Cuomo held a press conference to publicly berate the same Democrat, while another New York news outlet reported that other lawmakers are now facing threats.  

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Cuomo’s political machine received more than $2 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA), its executives, and its lobbying firms. The health care industry group also funneled more than $450,000 to members of the New York legislature in 2020. 

Author(s): David Sirota

Publication Date: 17 February 2021

Publication Site: Daily Poster

NY reveals 59% of Onondaga County’s Covid deaths are senior care facility residents

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.syracuse.com/coronavirus/2021/02/ny-reveals-59-of-onondaga-countys-covid-deaths-are-senior-care-facility-residents.html

Excerpt:

Residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities for seniors account for 59% of Onondaga County’s total Covid-19 death toll, according to data the state released for the first time over the weekend.

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The new data shows nursing home resident deaths account for 52 percent of Onondaga County’s 626 Covid-19 deaths. Before the state released that data, a Syracuse.com investigation estimated that total deaths of nursing home residents were 50% higher than reported by the state and that they accounted for about 60% of all local deaths. Shortly after that story was published, the state Attorney General’s office issued a report that said the state underreported nursing home deaths by 50%.

The new data for the first time gives a breakdown of Covid-19 deaths among residents of Onondaga County assisted living facilities and adult care homes. These facilities provide non-medical services to adults unable to live independently. The data shows 40 residents of these facilities in Onondaga County died of Covid-19 as of Feb. 6. Those deaths combined with nursing home resident deaths total 367, or 59% of the county’s 626 Covid-19 fatalities.

Author(s): James T. Mulder

Publication Date: 8 February 2021

Publication Site: syracuse.com

Joint motion filed in St. Clare’s pension case

Mary Pat Campbell
Joint motion filed in St. Clare’s pension case

Excerpt:

It’s been a little over two years since 1,100 former St. Clare’s health care workers learned they were no longer receiving their pensions.

The legal battle continues, after a lawsuit has been filed against the Albany Roman Catholic Diocese, the St. Clare’s Corporation, and two local bishops.

Attorney General, Letitia James, is also launching a separate investigation. But now, a joint motion has been filed between the lawyers working on behalf of the pensioners and the Attorney General’s Office to compel the defendants to produce documents and information.

Author(s): Jamie DeLine

Publication Date: 16 February 2021

Publication Site: ABC News 10

COVID-19: ‘Progress Is Being Made’ Latimer Says; Latest Breakdown Of Westchester Cases

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://dailyvoice.com/new-york/northsalem/news/covid-19-progress-is-being-made-latimer-says-latest-breakdown-of-westchester-cases/803391/

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Excerpt:

Westchester is making progress on administering the COVID-19 vaccination, County Executive George Latimer said, citing a decreasing number of hospitalizations and active cases.

There are currently 6,602 active COVID-19 cases being monitored in Westchester, Latimer announced on Tuesday, Feb. 16, down from 7,353 late last week and more than 11,000 cases three weeks ago, representing an approximately 40 percent drop in the past month.

Author(s): Zak Fallia

Publication Date: 16 February 2021

Publication Site: Daily Voice