Andrew Cuomo’s Report On Nursing Home Deaths Marked By Clear Conflicts Of Interest
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has relied on elite consulting firm McKinsey & Company to handle several aspects of the state’s coronavirus response.
Cuomo cited grim predictions from McKinsey and other consultants to justify clearing up hospital bed space in New York by forcing nursing homes to accept positive coronavirus patients.
McKinsey then analyzed data for a state report that Cuomo claims absolves him of blame for thousands of nursing home deaths in the state.
McKinsey’s role in developing the after-action report on nursing home deaths means the firm was analyzing the effects of policies it had a hand in creating.
Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has relied on the same high-powered consulting firm to guide key aspects of his planning for the coronavirus pandemic, as well as to analyze the results of those decisions, including the controversial policy to require nursing homes to accept residents even if they had coronavirus.
McKinsey & Company’s work on both the state’s coronavirus response and the evaluation of that response presents a clear conflict of interest for the firm and the Cuomo administration.
“The more we find out about the Cuomo administration’s disastrous coronavirus response, the more suspicious his actions look,” Rep. Steve Scalise, the top Republican on the House select subcommittee on the response to the coronavirus crisis, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Cuomo began citing McKinsey’s alarming projections about the coronavirus peak in mid-March, just as the state began to see an uptick in cases. Concerned that the state’s hospitals could not deal with an expected tidal wave of sick patients, Cuomo enacted a much-criticized policy on March 25 to require hospitals to send nursing home residents back to their facilities even if they had the virus.
Cuomo has faced intense backlash over the policy, with his critics blaming him for many of the 6,400 reported deaths of nursing home residents. (The Cuomo administration in May admitted knowingly underreporting the number of nursing home deaths.)
The governor claimed vindication on July 6, touting the release of a report from the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH).
The report asserted that the March 25 order could not have caused a surge in nursing home deaths because of the timing of the policy change and the peak in nursing home fatalities. The study instead pinned blame on 37,5000 nursing home staffers across the state, claiming that they unwittingly spread the virus to residents of their facilities.
https://dailycaller.com/2020/07/12/andrew-cuomo-new-york-nursing-home-deaths-coronavirus-mckinsey/