MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle called out Governor Cuomo this morning on his devastating nursing home policy in March that sent covid-infected nursing home patients back to their nursing homes and led to 6300 deaths in New York’s nursing homes.
Watch:
When Cuomo is even getting called out on his deadly nursing home order on MSNBC, you know he's in trouble. pic.twitter.com/W5LXIfu3Nl
— Nate Madden (@NateOnTheHill) June 22, 2020
Ruhle said House Republicans were looking into this policy and directly asked Cuomo if he took responsibility for these deaths. As soon as his mouth opened, however, he blamed Republicans for playing politics.
Ruhle quickly interrupted, telling Cuomo that “these are people’s lives, people’s parent’s lives.”
Cuomo then claimed that New York had more people die in nursing homes than anywhere else because they had more people die. He then pivoted to blaming the entire federal government for being late with their European travel ban, saying they failed to realize the virus was coming from Europe which allowed 3 million people to bring the virus into New York in January, February and March.
But even if that were true, it doesn’t excuse his policy of sending covid-infected elderly patients back to the nursing homes, where the disease spread and killed 6,300 people. It was a terrible policy decision and he’s clearly evading the question. And as we know, they had plenty of beds that went unused in both the overflow hospital and the Navy ship that was parked on the coast.
I’ll give Ruhle props for doing a much better job at holding Cuomo accountable for this than did ABC News anchor Amy Robach last week, who came just short of professing her love for him. I like how Ruhle framed the question and how she didn’t pull back just because it was a Republican investigation. In fact she seemed to give it legitimacy by reminding Cuomo this is about people’s lives. Kudos to her.