As New York City residents, we at ThePopTort were mesmerized by part 1 of Spike Lee’s astonishing NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021½, which began airing last night on HBO. But I fully understand if you missed it. It was a bit like watching someone else’s home movies. Also, it forces us to rehash the horrors of a few unpleasant characters - although seeing the hilarious way Spike chyroned “a certain former President from Queens” was worth the whole thing. There’s actually a lot of humor in this series.
Peppered throughout, of course, is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who leaves office today. Just like his dad Mario, Andrew used his (10!) years as governor to do damage to the rights of patients harmed by negligent health care. This mission of his began as soon as he stepped into office and ended with the pandemic. ThePopTort was there for all of it so we decided that now would be a good time to do an Andrew Cuomo retrospective. For history, you know.
Within weeks of taking office in 2011, Andrew set up a task force under the guise of Medicaid “redesign,” primarily as a ruse to give New York’s powerful hospital lobby a way to force “tort reform” onto injured patients when clearly such laws would never pass on their own. The task force “recommendations” were two-fold: a $250,000 cap on non-economic damages, and a state fund to pay for the medical care of babies catastrophically harmed due to negligence at birth. Note that qualifying families would have to have already won their legal case and should already be entitled to full compensation. Instead, these families would have to beg the fund for money. Imagine putting such additional burdens on families that already face unimaginable challenges caring for a profoundly disabled child - while leaving the responsible hospital essentially off the hook.
Cuomo’s task force team, dominated by his hospital friends who would financially benefit from these laws, met secretly and made recommendations that went straight into the governor’s budget. The Center for Justice & Democracy filed an ethics complaint against Cuomo’s task force for this. His response was two-fold: publicly attack and try to bully CJ&D via his large bully brigade; privately, feeling the political heat, pull the damages cap out of this budget. But unfortunately, the baby fund stayed. It’s really what the hospitals wanted anyway.
Once the hospitals got their big prize, things calmed down a bit. Not completely, of course. For example, we wrote about how Cuomo later stuck a provision into his executive budget to make it easier for incompetent doctors to hide their malpractice records. But at least “tort reform” seemed to be off the table for a while.
Then came COVID. Cuomo almost immediately immunized hospitals and nursing homes from liability during the pandemic, slipping this immunity law into his budget at a time when almost no one noticed – except, of course, his hospital lobbyist friends who wrote it. This, by the way, included hospital systems that kept suing patients throughout the pandemic over unpaid medical bills. Cuomo’s immunity law became the blueprint for many states, often expanding immunity even beyond New York’s law with disastrous results particularly for nursing home residents. Cuomo's friends also went to Washington to help Sen. Majority Mitch McConnell write a national immunity bill. McConnell then held the nation hostage by demanding that Congress pass corporate immunity before allowing the country to get any stimulus relief.
Fortunately Cuomo’s friends didn’t get their way in DC. Their NY law was eventually reversed by the NY legislature and Cuomo’s nursing home legacy, as bad as it looks now, has yet to be finally written. But he’s finally out. Or as CJ&D Executive Director Joanne Doroshow put it to Mr. Cuomo back in 2011, “after you apply the facts to the law, that sound you'll hear is the steel trap closing on you.”
See ya!
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