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<\/p>\nby Jon Miltimore
\nThe Libertarian Institute<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
At an April 23 press conference, Gov. Andrew Cuomo sounded indignant when a reporter asked if anyone had objected to New York\u2019s policy of forcing nursing homes to admit recently discharged COVID-19 patients.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey don\u2019t have the right to object,\u201d Cuomo\u00a0answered<\/a>\u00a0before the reporter finished his question. \u201cThat is the rule, and that is the regulation, and they have to comply with it.\u201d<\/p>\n New York isn\u2019t the only state to adopt a policy ordering long-term care facilities to admit COVID-19-infected patients discharged from hospitals. New Jersey, Massachusetts, and California\u2014three states also hit particularly hard by the novel coronavirus\u2014passed similar policies<\/a>\u00a0to free up hospital beds to make room for sicker patients.<\/p>\n The practice is coming under increased scrutiny by health experts and family members of deceased patients who say the orders needlessly put the most susceptible populations at risk.<\/p>\n \u201cThe whole thing has just been handled awfully \u2026 by everybody in regard to nursing homes,\u201d said Kathleen Cole, a nurse who recently lost her 89-year-old mother who lived at Ferncliff Nursing Home in Rhinebeck, New York. \u201cIt\u2019s like a slaughterhouse at these places.\u201d<\/p>\n Cole, who\u00a0shared her story with the\u00a0<\/a>Bucks County Courier Times<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>told the paper her mother, Dolores McGoldrick, became infected with COVID-19 on April 2 after Ferncliff re-admitted a resident who had been discharged in late March. Two weeks later her mother, a former school teacher, was dead.<\/p>\n McGoldrick is one of nearly five thousand COVID-19 victims who died in New York nursing homes, according to\u00a0new figures<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>. New York\u2019s high nursing home death toll is not an outlier. California recently\u00a0released data<\/a>\u00a0showing that some 40 percent of California\u2019s COVID-19 fatalities have come from eldercare homes. In Pennsylvania, nursing homes\u00a0account<\/a>\u00a0for 65 percent of COVID-19 deaths. Both states, like New York, had orders in place that required nursing homes to admit recently released COVID-19 patients.<\/p>\n These results are not surprising to some. Health experts and trade associations had warned early on that forcing nursing homes to take on newly discharged COVID-19 patients was a recipe for disaster, noting that such facilities didn\u2019t have the ability to properly quarantine the infected.<\/p>\n \u201cThis approach will introduce the highly contagious virus into more nursing homes. There will be more hospitalizations for nursing home residents who need ventilator care and ultimately, a higher number of deaths. Issuing such an order is a mistake and there is a better solution,\u201d American Health Care Association President and CEO Mark Parkinson\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0in March after New York\u2019s order went into effect.<\/p>\n David Grabowski, a professor of health policy at Harvard Medical School, sounded incredulous when asked about the policy.<\/p>\n \u201cNursing homes are working so hard to keep the virus out, and now we\u2019re going to be introducing new COVID-positive patients?\u201d Grabowski\u00a0told NBC<\/a>.<\/p>\n Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition in New York, echoed that sentiment.<\/p>\n \u201cTo have a mandate that nursing homes accept COVID-19 patients has put many people in grave danger,\u201d Mollot\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0the\u00a0Bucks County Courier Times.<\/em><\/p>\n The question, of course, is why states began ordering nursing homes to take in COVID-19 infected residents. The one thing we know of COVID-19, and have known from the beginning, is that the virus is particularly deadly for the elderly and people with compromised immune systems.<\/p>\n State leaders will have to answer that question themselves. But one answer might be that central planning is inherently irrational.<\/p>\n The Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek\u00a0observed<\/a>\u00a0that the problem with trying to centrally plan economies and other complex social orders is that central planners cannot possibly access, comprehend, and weigh the vast amount of information relevant to their sweeping decisions.<\/p>\n The only way to cope with this \u201cknowledge problem\u201d is by bringing to bear the special knowledge that each individual has about the matters he or she is intimately familiar with. And that can only happen through decentralized processes, like the market price system.<\/p>\n This lesson has been lost on many, but particularly so on politicians and bureaucrats who imagine they possess the knowledge to design a more perfect social order. As Hayek famously explained in\u00a0The Fatal Conceit<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is why individuals are\u00a0more competent decision-makers<\/a>\u00a0about their own affairs than governments. For this reason, a society that removes decision-making from individuals and places it in the hands of central planners invites disorder and endangerment, the economist Thomas Sowell has observed.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong,\u201d\u00a0wrote\u00a0<\/a>Sowell.<\/p>\n Media\u00a0were quick to describe<\/a>\u00a0the nursing home tragedy as a \u201cmarket failure,\u201d pointing out that 70 percent of nursing homes in the US are for-profit. This is hardly a market failure, however. Long-term care facilities saw the danger and warned public officials what would happen.<\/p>\n What were they told?<\/p>\n