How States Turned Nursing Homes Into ‘Slaughter Houses’ By Forcing Them to Admit Discharged COVID-19 Patients | Jon Miltimore fee.org/articles/how-s… via @feeonline
At an April 23 press conference, @NYGovCuomo sounded indignant when a reporter asked if anyone had objected to New York’s policy of forcing nursing homes to admit recently discharged COVID-19 patients.
“They don’t have the right to object,” Cuomo answered before the reporter finished his question. “That is the rule, and that is the regulation, and they have to comply with it.”
New York isn’t the only state to adopt a policy ordering long-term care facilities to admit COVID-19-infected patients discharged from hospitals. NJ, MA, and CA—3 states also hit hard by coronavirus—passed similar policies to free up hospital beds to make room for sicker patients
The practice is coming under increased scrutiny by health experts and family members of deceased patients who say the orders needlessly put the most susceptible populations at risk.
Nearly 5000 COVID-19 victims died in New York nursing homes, according to new figures. New York’s high nursing home death toll is not an outlier. California recently released data showing that some 40% of California’s COVID-19 fatalities have come from eldercare homes.
In Pennsylvania, nursing homes account for 65% of COVID-19 deaths. Both states, like New York, had orders in place that required nursing homes to admit recently released COVID-19 patients.
Individuals are more competent decision-makers about their own affairs than governments. For this reason, a society that removes decision-making from individuals and places it in the hands of central planners invites disorder and endangerment, economist Thomas Sowell has observed
"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong," wrote Sowell.
Media were quick to describe the nursing home tragedy as a “market failure,” pointing out that 70 percent of nursing homes in the US are for-profit. This is hardly a market failure, however. Long-term care facilities saw the danger and warned public officials what would happen.
What were they told?
“That is the rule, and that is the regulation,” Cuomo told them, “and they have to comply with it.”
“That is the rule, and that is the regulation,” Cuomo told them, “and they have to comply with it.”
Gov. Cuomo and other officials responsible for these policies, in their hubris, presumed to know enough to centrally plan a complex society’s response to a complex pandemic, and to know more than individuals with local knowledge, industry expertise, and skin in the game —
— like the elder care experts and businesspeople who tried to warn policymakers about the disastrous effects the policy would have.
This presumption may stem from another kind of conceit: the dictatorial arrogance on display when Cuomo indignantly insisted that unquestioning compliance was the only appropriate response to his mandate.
Tragically, that conceit was quite literally fatal for many of the most vulnerable members of society.
