The Justice Department announced Wednesday that it is expanding its investigation into New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s disastrous nursing home policy.
In May, Cuomo enacted a policy that forced nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients, essentially turning his state’s long-term care facilities into COVID-19 breeding grounds.
An investigation by the Associated Press discovered that Cuomo’s administration has severely undercounted the number of senior citizens who died as a result of the policy, and now the DOJ wants to know why.
New York has logged only 6,722 deaths in its nursing homes, but both Democrats and Republicans suspect that number is off by thousands, since Cuomo’s administration only counts residents who died on a nursing home’s property and not those who died after being taken to a hospital.
To find out the truth, the DOJ submitted an inquiry asking for data from hundreds of nursing home facilities.
Cuomo’s administration, however, called the move a “sham” and a “scummy abuse of power,” according to NBC-4 New York.
“In this hyper-political environment … everybody wants to point fingers,” Cuomo said earlier this month while promoting his new memoir on his handling of the crisis. “New York, actually, we’re number 46 out of 50 in terms of percentage of deaths in nursing homes — 46 out of 50. So, yes, people died in nursing homes. Yes, we’ve learned a lot of lessons, but 46 out of 50, it’s not a predominantly New York problem.”
The DOJ made a similar request in August, but only to a few dozen publicly run nursing homes. Now, the DOJ is asking more than 600 long-term care facilities to report how many residents have died over the past several months.
Even New York’s Democrats have argued that transparency is important for the state to move forward, and praised the DOJ’s investigation into the matter.
“This is a necessary step … for families to get a sense of closure from the traumatic experience that they had to go through,” said state Assemblyman Ronald Kim.
