Lawmaker disappointed after DOJ calls off Pennsylvania nursing home probe
(The Center Square) – At least one Republican lawmaker in Pennsylvania disagrees with the U.S. Department of Justice’s decision to drop an investigation into the state’s COVID-19 nursing home deaths.
Rep. Frank Ryan, R-Lebanon, said he and other lawmakers “pieced together” information to uncover the “serious problems” inside the state’s nursing homes, where at least one-third of Pennsylvania’s 28,000 COVID-19 deaths occurred.
“These irregularities must be examined,” he said. “Now is not the time for the DOJ to abandon its investigation into what happened in our nursing care facilities.”
Steven H. Rosenbaum, chief of the DOJ’s special litigation section, told Gov. Tom Wolf’s office last week it was dropping the investigation nearly a year after it began under the administration of former President Donald Trump. The department also sent a letter to Michigan dismissing the probe, according to The Associated Press.
New Jersey and New York also supplied information and documents to the department last year as part of the same review, but weren’t sent letters as of July 22.
Chief among the concerns raised by Republican lawmakers was an early pandemic policy that instructed nursing homes to reaccept residents discharged from the hospital after receiving treatment for the virus.
The House Government Oversight Committee even launched its own review of deaths and the state’s policies for nursing homes in March.
“Justice requires us, regardless of political affiliation, to determine what happened to these people,” Ryan said. “We are trusting our government to do the right thing and provide state lawmakers, survivors and the public with answers.”
Acting Secretary of Health Alison Beam has said that the policy was crafted based on a recommendation from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a way to ease the burden on the health care system. Besides, she said, allowing virus patients to recover at home was a top priority, and congregate facilities are where many seniors live.
Former Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine said last year the virus was “unwittingly” transmitted by “brave, but unfortunately asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic staff.”
“Our actions allowed hospitals to reserve beds for the most severely ill patients and to discharge those who are less severely ill to skilled nursing facilities,” she said, paraphrasing a directive from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). “Those are the guidelines we received from CMS and so we implemented those guidelines.”
Levine left the post to join President Joe Biden’s administration in January.
State data shows more than half of the COVID-19 fatalities were recorded in hospitals and about 9,500 were in long-term living facilities.
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