WH nursing-home rules vs. another NY
The Trump administration will unveil mandatory coronavirus testing and reporting rules for nursing homes this week in an effort to prevent a recurrence of tragic death tolls like that in New York state earlier this year, The Post has learned.
The rules will require a nursing home to test patients if anyone in the facility contracts COVID-19 or exhibits symptoms. And in most cases, the nursing home will be required to publicly report the results.
One administration official was blunt in describing the changes.
“President Trump is mandating everything Gov. Cuomo failed to do in order to protect America’s seniors from this virus,” the official said.
The coronavirus swept through Empire State nursing homes in March and April, killing at least 6,500 people.
The true toll could be much higher, as some fatalities aren’t counted by the state — including those of residents transported to a hospital before their deaths.
An Associated Press analysis found that as many as 11,000 New York nursing-home residents may have died of COVID-19.
Cuomo’s Health Department issued a controversial March 25 edict barring nursing homes from turning away coronavirus-positive patients, and his role in sending 6,300 infected people to nursing homes during the crisis has been blamed in part for the higher death rate in New York.
The Trump administration is able to force the new testing and transparency due to the federal government’s power to dispense Medicare and Medicaid funds.
An aggressive effort to get pointof-care COVID-19 testing that offers quick, on-site results in all nursing homes could start saving lives ahead of the fall flu season, administration officials said.
A fact sheet on the new rules seen by The Post says that “laboratories — including nursing homes using point-of-care testing devices — will be required to publicly report diagnostic test results and costs. The new rules also require hospitals to report COVID-19 cases and related data to the US Department of Health and Human Services.”
The document notes that the Trump administration is “providing point-of-care testing devices and test kits to each of the Medicareand Medicaid-certified nursing homes in the nation that received a Clinical Lab Improvement Amendments waiver to conduct low-complexity testing.” About 90 percent had a waiver as of last month.
Nursing-home staffers will also be subject to mandatory testing.
A separate initiative rolling out this week from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will offer training to staffers, using lessons learned by the agencies’ nursing-home “strike teams” during the first wave of infections this year.
Nursing homes that do not comply with the new testing and disclosure rules will face financial penalties.
Cuomo gave a self-congratulatory speech last Monday, the opening night of the Democratic National Convention, about his management of the crisis, despite the massive death toll at the state’s nursing homes.
He blasted the Trump administration as “dysfunctional and incompetent” and cheered New York under his leadership, saying, “We climbed the impossible mountain. Right now, we are on the other side.”
The governor is writing a book about the pandemic. Titled “American Crisis,” it is scheduled for release on Oct. 13.