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How New York Turned Nursing Homes Into 'Slaughter Houses'

McGoldrick is one of nearly five thousand COVID-19 victims who died in New York nursing homes, according to new figures from The New York Times. New York’s high nursing home death toll is not an outlier. California recently released data showing that some 40 percent of California’s COVID-19 fatalities have come from eldercare homes. In Pennsylvania, nursing homes account for 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.

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’t have the ability to properly quarantine the infected.

“This 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,” American Health Care Association President and CEO Mark Parkinson announced in March after New York’s order went into effect.

David Grabowski, a professor of health policy at Harvard Medical School, sounded incredulous when asked about the policy.

“Nursing homes are working so hard to keep the virus out, and now we’re going to be introducing new COVID-positive patients?” Grabowski told NBC.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek observed that 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.[/u]

The only way to cope with this “knowledge problem” 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.

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 The Fatal Conceit: