By Christen Smith | The Center Square

Pennsylvania acting Secretary of Health Alison Beam stood behind her department’s guidance issued to nursing homes last spring to accept COVID-19 patients back into their facilities after hospitalization.

Critics argue the “dangerous” policy contributed to more than 12,000 nursing home deaths, but Beam said Thursday that the Department of Health took the directive straight from the federal government in an effort to reduce the strain on the health care system. 

“We wanted to make sure that our hospitals were not overrun,” she told the House Appropriations Committee. “We knew at that the time that other hospitals were being overrun and we wanted to make sure it [the policy] could be done safely.” 

The department first issued the order in March. Since then, state shows about 67,000 residents in long-term care facilities have contracted the virus and 12,371 died, accounting for more than half of the state’s reported COVID-19 deaths.

Rep. Natalie Mihalek, R-Pittsburgh, pressed Beam on whether she thought the policy, in hindsight, was a mistake. Beam did not respond to the question directly.

“We wanted COVID-19 patients to recover at their homes, and their homes, in many cases, were these facilities,” she said. 

“The fact that you are avoiding the answers clearly makes it clear that it was a mistake,” said Committee Majority Chairman Stan Saylor, R-York. 

Pennsylvania is among a handful of states under scrutiny for adopting the controversial policy last spring at the onset of the pandemic. In New York, about 9,000 COVID-19 patients were sent back to nursing homes. It’s unclear how many patients in Pennsylvania were impacted by the policy.

Across the country, about one-third of COVID-19 deaths are linked to nursing homes. Pennsylvania ranks eighth in the country for such fatalities. Three facilities in the state rank in the top 10 nationally for the most reported deaths. 

In August, the U.S. Department of Justice asked the governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Michigan for nursing home data as it considered whether to investigate if the policy violated federal law that protects the rights of residents in state-run long-term living facilities.

Dr. Rachel Levine, who resigned as Secretary of Health in January to join President Joe Biden’s administration, has said in the past that the policy was used sparingly across the state.

“Our actions allowed hospitals to reserve beds for the most severely ill patients and to discharge those who are less severely ill to skilled nursing facilities,” she said, paraphrasing a directive from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). “Those are the guidelines we received from CMS and so we implemented those guidelines.”

The department said the majority of the outbreaks seen in senior living facilities were “unwittingly” transmitted by “brave, but unfortunately asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic staff.”

“We only had a few cases where patients were sent to rehab facilities that had the full ability to take care of them because we had to decompress the hospitals,” she said.

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