BUFFALO, N.Y. — The Health and Human Services Secretary started an interview Thursday with, “We’ve got to get people back to work, back to school, and also back to health care.“
With states including New York languishing with shutdown prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Secretary Alex Azar came to Buffalo to urge people to once again access healthcare that has largely been denied them.
Azar visit included the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Cancer and Buffalo General Hospital, where our one-on-one interview took place in a corner of the hospital converted into a storing area for extra beds, gloves and visors as part of the pandemic readiness effort.
“I was up in the cardiovascular labs here at Buffalo General. The procedures are down radically because people aren’t coming in and getting the echo-cardiograms, the stress tests and the other preventive maintenance that they need. Cancer screenings are down 90 percent here in Buffalo. That’s real health consequence,” Azar said.
Just Wednesday, Buffalo General and some outpatient surgical centers were green-lighted by state government to resume elective procedures.
I asked the Secretary if he thought the Cuomo administration was being too cautious when it came to re-opening hospitals and medical facilities.
“Yes,” Azar said, “people have to get their preventive healthcare services done. They need to get those so-called elective health care procedures done.”
2 On Your Side also asked Secretary Azar about nursing homes. On Monday, the federal agency that regulates nursing homes, the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services sent out a new memorandum to states. It warned that states that fail to inspect all nursing homes infection control procedures could face a loss of federal revenue, up to 10%. Why penalize states now dealing for the pandemic?
Azar said, “Because we’ve seen over 40% of the fatalities across the country are our patients in our nursing homes. These are our more vulnerable citizens. We’ve got to protect them and we’ve got to get the states to wake up and really pay attention to survey, certification, inspection, sanction and even de-licensing facilities if they will not do the job of protecting their seniors.”
If nursing homes fail to meet standards intended to protect elderly citizens in nursing homes, Azar says, “then they shouldn’t be in business.”