A healthier N.Y. after Zucker
The biggest surprise about state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker’s resignation is how long it took to happen.
Given his intimate role in the Cuomo administration’s nursing home scandal — which might have gotten the former governor impeached if he hadn’t resigned — Zucker forfeited the credibility necessary to stay on the job.
His actions also damaged the overall reputation of the Health Department, which has lost a number of top-level officials in recent months, perhaps because they resented being used and misused by the political higher-ups.
With Zucker gone, here is what Gov. Hochul and the next commissioner can do to put this vital arm of the state government back on its feet.
Clear the air on COVID. After the many pandemic-related deceptions perpetrated by Zucker and the rest of Team Cuomo, setting the record straight should be a high priority.
The department could start by clarifying the story behind the much-debated March 2020 directive compelling nursing homes to admit COVID-positive patients during the thick of the pandemic’s first wave.
Cuomo superseded the directive with a separate rule barring hospitals from discharging infected patients in the first place, and the original rule was mysteriously removed from the state’s website last spring. Yet Cuomo and Zucker later said they stood by the original policy and that it remains in effect.
How did this policy come to be issued? Did officials consider the danger for nursing home residents? Is it currently in force or not? Would officials do the same in future pandemics? The public deserves answers.
The department should also retract the white paper it published in July 2020, which purported to show that the March directive had no effect on resident deaths. It turned out to have been heavily rewritten by non-scientists in the governor’s office and was riddled with omissions, distortions and falsehoods.
The new commissioner should review how that paper was prepared and issue an updated analysis that is corrected and vetted by outside experts.
Practice transparency. If Zucker and Cuomo had released accurate nursing home data last year — as the law required them to do — the issue might never have blown up into the scandal it became.
Yet even today the Health Department is resisting the release of its pandemic data, including most of the 63 data sets formally requested by the Empire Center in late June.
The new commissioner should not only comply promptly with requests for this information, but proactively publish it in a downloadable, tabular format — inviting researchers, watchdogs and curious citizens dig through the numbers and see what insights they can find. Letting the public have access to their own records isn’t just the law, it’s also good government.
Hochul should start by ordering the prompt publication of all COVID data in the state’s possession — including but not limited to the Freedom of Information Law requests filed by my employer, the Empire Center.
Refocus on public health. Responsibility for the state’s massive Medicaid health plan for the low-income and disabled was shifted to the Health Department in the 1990s under then-Gov. George Pataki. With 7 million enrollees and an $80 billion budget, the program has come to overshadow every other part of the department — especially its core public health functions such as preventing and managing pandemics and regulating health-care providers.
The money and personnel available for those critical efforts has actually declined over the past decade even as spending on Medicaid mushroomed, which is likely one reason the state was caught so unprepared when the coronavirus hit. Renew the push for quality.
While this state is home to some of the best hospitals in the world, New Yorkers might be surprised to learn that its hospital system as a whole scores near the bottom of quality report cards by published by the federal government and others.
In previous decades, the Health Department would highlight shortcomings like that and push the state’s providers to do better — but more recently, it seems to have bowed to pressure from the industries it regulates, which are some of the most influential and deep-pocketed lobbying forces in Albany. Hochul and her new commissioner should put the public health ahead of special interests.
There can be few higher priorities for Hochul than restoring the Health Department to the strength and credibility it needs to lead the state out of the current pandemic and to prepare for the next one. As we learned over the past two years, it’s a matter of life and death.