If the credible allegations are true, this story would confirm that the healthcare industry is often more interested in making money from COVID-19 than stopping its spread.
Governor Cuomo of New York is responsible for nearly 6,200 COVID-19 deaths in the state’s nursing homes after he inexplicably demanded that the facilities take in coronavirus-positive cases. But while Cuomo’s mistake seems to be just bad governance in action, a nursing facility in Whitefish, Montana, seems to have taken COVID-19 patients and roomed them with relatively healthy patients for pure profit motivation…or at least a recent lawsuit against Whitefish Care and Rehabilitation alleges.
Thirteen residents died at the facility, and a lawsuit filed on their behalf names “Sweetwater Entity Defendants” and includes the Whitefish Care and Rehabilitation Center, Sweetwater Whitefish Opco, Sweetwater Care MT OPCO, Sweetwater Care OPCO, Sweetwater Care Propco, Sweetwater Care Resource, Sweetwater Investment Management, and “other Sweetwater-related corporate entities referenced in this complaint or yet to be discovered.”
The lawsuit alleges that the owners and operators of the Whitefish facility knowingly took COVID-19 positive patients for the extra COVID-related revenue, while simultaneously lowering the care for non-COVID patients. Worse yet, the lawsuit claims that the “health experts” housed the COVID-19 positive patients with relatively healthy residents of the nursing home, which spread the illness and killed some of the vulnerable elderly who lived there.
According to the Flathead Beacon, the lawsuit says that among the misdeeds conducted by the nursing home includes “rooming presumptive COVID-19 positive residents with COVID-19 negative residents.”
Montana DPHHS noted in an independent investigation that the facility’s “noncompliance has placed the health and safety of recipients in its care at risk for serious injury, serious harm, and serious impairment or death.”
[…] Unfortunately, many nursing homes volunteered to take positive COVID-19 patients – like the Whitefish Care and Rehabilitation Center, for example – in order to get rich quick. In other cases, it was the government that forced […]