This week, House Republicans on the Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis sent five letters to Democratic governors, demanding answers as to why these state leaders ordered nursing homes to admit patients who had tested positive for coronavirus. The House Republicans noted that the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued guidance suggesting that nursing homes should only admit patients if the facility could follow quarantine guidelines.
“Democrats failed our nursing home residents, plain and simple,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) declared in a statement Monday. “Despite clear warnings about exposing nursing homes to this virus, some Democrat governors decided it made more sense to force nursing homes to take in coronavirus patients, which resulted in countless avoidable deaths. The American people deserve to know what informed and motivated these decisions so it doesn’t happen again.”
“The decision of several governors to ignore federal protocols and instead mandate COVID-positive patients be forced back to their nursing homes ended up being a death sentence for tens of thousands of our nation’s most vulnerable citizens,” Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the ranking member on the committee, said in a statement.
Jordan, Scalise, and their colleagues sent letters to Governors Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.), Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich.), Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.), Tom Wolf (D-Pa.), and Phil Murphy (D-N.J.).
Each letter requests “information, at a granular level, about the science and information used to inform your decision to mandate nursing homes and long-term care facilities admit untested and contagious COVID-19 patients from hospitals. This decision likely contributed to the thousands of elderly deaths in .”
The letters quote CMS guidance issued on March 13. “This guidance does not direct any nursing home to accept a COVID-19 positive patient, if they are unable to do so safely,” the letters note. Indeed, the guidance urges that “nursing homes should admit any individual that they would normally admit to their facility, including individuals from hospitals where a case of COVID-19 was/is present” only if the nursing home can follow” CDC guidance. – READ MORE
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