Again and again, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has insisted that his policy requiring nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients was necessary because hospitals in the city could not handle the influx of patients and care for the existing ones at the same time.
His defense of the policy, which has left more than 6,000 senior citizens dead, makes it seem like he had no choice but the one he made. A recent New York Times report proves this is far from true.
During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, New York City opened a temporary hospital in the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center to help ease the crisis many hospitals in the city were experiencing. The city spent $52 million on the makeshift hospital in total, paying doctors at the facility as much as $732 per hour, according to the New York Times. But the hospital served only 79 patients total, and one nurse practitioner who worked in the facility said she “got paid $2,000 a day to sit on my phone and look at Facebook.”
A variety of factors contributed to the under-use of the temporary hospital. Many public hospitals were worried about the revenue loss if they referred patients to other hospitals. And getting patients to the temporary hospital was often difficult since many individual hospitals have exclusive contracts with ambulance companies. But the fact is: The city spent millions of dollars creating a medical facility that it never used, while other facilities that were not medically equipped — namely, long-term care facilities — were forced to treat vulnerable COVID-19 patients.
Cuomo had options. He could easily have created additional temporary hospitals such as the one in the Billie Jean King center and reserve it specifically for COVID-19 patients bound for nursing homes. Instead, he turned his state’s long-term care facilities into breeding grounds.
This was a devastating policy failure that cost thousands of lives. So the next time Cuomo tries to make an excuse — don’t let him. This was not his only choice, but it was the one he made. Now he must answer for it.
