The Minnesota Department of Health announced Monday that it took control of a nursing home center on Saturday because staff reported the facility has a growing list of unpaid bills that threaten critical services for residents.
The Ramsey County court granted a temporary order June 10 to allow regulators to ensure residents’ safety and continued care while operations and management issues are handled at the facility, Pine Haven Care Center in Pine Island, a news release said.
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Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s administration drastically undercounted COVID-19 nursing home deaths in the state, according to a state auditor general report reviewed by Fox News.
The damning report, which is expected to be released on Monday, reveals suspicious similarities to how former Democrat governor Andrew Cuomo hid nursing home deaths in New York.
Republican State Rep. Steven Johnson, the chairman of the Michigan House Oversight Committee, spoke with Fox News Digital in a telephone interview on Thursday. Whitmer [like Cuomo] is “well known” for her executive order “to place COVID-positive patients into nursing homes,” Johnson said.
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Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo started 2022 much like he ended 2021, with an apparent legal victory.
A lawyer for the disgraced ex-leader of the state said Monday that the Manhattan district attorney’s office ended its investigation into the Cuomo administration’s nursing home policies during the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis without pressing any charges.
“I was told that after a thorough investigation – as we have said all along – there was no evidence to suggest any laws were broken,” Elkan Abramowitz, former outside counsel for the executive chamber, said in a statement posted by Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi on Twitter.
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A North Oaks nursing home rejected a Catholic employee’s request for a vaccine exemption despite granting exemptions to employees of other faiths, a complaint filed Monday claims.
Daniel Reinke, a sales and marketing manager at Brookdale Senior Living Center in North Oaks, says he was placed on unpaid leave and threatened with termination when he refused to get vaccinated for COVID-19 on religious grounds.
“I sincerely believe that receiving an injection produced, developed, or tested using human cell lines derived from direct abortions is sinful. All three available vaccines in the United States were tested, developed, or produced using these cell lines. I believe that abortion is a mortal sin, and any act supporting it, such as receiving the COVID-19 injection, would make me complicit in the act of abortion,” Reinke says in a charge of discrimination filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
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Minnesota long-term care facilities like nursing homes and memory care centers say they’re in an impossible situation.
President Joe Biden unveiled a mandate last month that effectively requires U.S. employers to make their workers receive the coronavirus vaccine or face termination. This is likely to force a significant portion of workers in long-term care facilities out of their jobs. However, the industry can’t afford to lose more staff as it’s already overburdened and unable to provide care for patients amid a labor shortage.
“There is going to be a mass exodus” of workers, warned Natalie Zeleznikar, a nursing home administrator and executive.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie LeDuff has reached a settlement with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services to gain access to data on the number of COVID-19 nursing home deaths in the state.
The health department agreed to release some of the public records LeDuff requested. The department also acknowledges it can’t determine if some patients killed by COVID-19 contracted the virus at a nursing home or other long-term care facility.
LeDuff sued March 9 after submitting a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for data on COVID-19 deaths but the MDHHS failed to produce the requested records. The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation represented him.
“We stood up to Goliath and won,” LeDuff said in a statement. “While I’m pleased that some of the records were released, the state’s overall response is alarming and disappointing. Still, this is a win for the people of Michigan, and I’m glad this lawsuit was able to shed some light.”
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For the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic, Michigan started counting additional long-term care category deaths from SARS-CoV-2.
Long-term care deaths account for 35% of the state’s total COVID-19 death toll.
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New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is wrong to say his state was following the Trump administration’s guidance when ordering nursing homes to admit coronavirus patients from hospitals, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator (CMS) Seema Verma said Wednesday.
“Under no circumstances should a hospital discharge a patient to a nursing home that’s not prepared to take care of those patients’ needs,” Verma said on Fox News Radio. “The federal guidelines are absolutely clear about this.”
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Infection prevention and control deficiencies were widespread across most of the country’s nursing homes before the coronavirus outbreak, a watchdog group reported Thursday.
More than 82% of the United States’ 15,500 nursing homes were cited for infection prevention and control deficiencies between 2013 and 2017, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) wrote in a blog post Thursday.
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Amy Lynn Twyman Smith is the executive director of an assisted living network in Newark, Ohio. Her father died when she was 10 years old. Growing up, she was close with her father’s mother, who eventually developed Alzheimer’s disease. Amy saw first-hand just how important quality care was for her grandmother and her family. Her connection with her grandmother cultivated a passion in Amy that led her to work in assisted living for the entirety of her career.
“It can be hard on families,” she expressed. “I want our care to be the most wonderful experience anyone could have. And especially for our residents, I want every day to be wonderful, as if it was their last.”
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