"Oops, they did it again": Negligence, Institutionalisation & the US Public Health Crisis
Verónica Sousa / March 3 / US Public Health
Cruz & Cuomo, earlier this year
Last Saturday, SNL (Saturday Night Live) aired a sketch that brought together three cases of injustice in the news, using comedy to demonstrate the depth of social issues with levity. In this sketch, Britney Spears (played by Chloe Fineman) is a talk show host of a show called, “Oops, You Did it Again,” a nod to the actual Britney Spears’ first single that catapulted her into fame in the late 90s. She interviews disgraced public figures and holds them somewhat accountable by providing a public space for them to apologize, implying her own desire for better apologies regarding her own career and conservatorship case.
Her first guest is Texas Senator Ted Cruz (played by a hilarious Aidy Bryant), who recently fled to Cancún, Mexico while a brutal snowstorm ravaged his state. As a result of the storm, people have been left with no support infrastructure, no water or electricity, and a number of deaths. A man-made disaster. Her second guest is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (played by Pete Davidson), whose office has been under fire recently for underreporting nursing home deaths during the pandemic. Gina Carano (played by Cecily Strong), the Star Wars “The Mandalorian” series actress who was recently fired for an anti-semitic tweet, is the third guest. Spears gets them to reluctantly apologize, while implicitly referring to a recent Hulu/New York Times documentary, “Framing Britney Spears,” which uncovers and criticizes the violence behind the real Spears’ public downfall and ongoing conservatorship. This topical sketch ties together various parts of my own analysis of the current Cuomo fiasco.
SNL’s sketch featured parodies of both state figures.
According to The New York Times and CNN, Cuomo’s office delayed getting the nursing home death numbers to the US Department of Justice over the summer. Cuomo has defended this decision, arguing that his intention was never to hide the true number of deaths. During the chaos and burnout at the time, these statistics were simply placed on the back burner to prioritize other pandemic issues. However, some nursing home deaths have been marked down as hospital deaths, decreasing the number for the former, making the state look better. Many think of this as a follow-up problem to Cuomo’s decree in March 2020, in which he declared that nursing home residents who had tested positive for COVID-19 in hospitals, but were doing well, will return to their residences, thus potentially leaving hospitals to spread the disease to other elderly residents. Cuomo did this in order to increase the number of ICU beds in hospitals. Instead, it created a nightmare of case after case of COVID-19 in nursing homes across the state, and thus many deaths that could have been prevented.
The news of this statistical cover up has painted Cuomo in a different light, as someone tough but fake, a bold leader who is woefully incompetent. But is he really incompetent? Or is this business as usual? Democrats, like Cuomo, are invested in maintaining the status quo. Fewer nursing home deaths mean lower insurance costs for the state. The commodification of care and neoliberalism have brought on this disaster, not so much Cuomo or anyone in his office. His defensiveness in response to these allegations only proves a personal weakness, though it upholds the status quo as such.
This situation is not so different from Ted Cruz’s this week. Even the SNL character of Cruz alludes to the notion that the two are not so different (to which the character of Cuomo incredulously refuses any association, and later Carano’s character too). The unprecedented and disastrous Texas snowstorm and its aftermath have been an ongoing nightmare. People have frozen to death in their own homes. Many Texans have been without water and electricity for days, which has caused problems in hospitals in which people depend on machines to survive. It has also been a frozen hell for those who are unhoused, in immigration detention centers, county jails, and state prisons. How ironic that Cruz fled to Mexico, citing his daughters as the reason, while he supported policies that directly destroyed families crossing the border. His shameless cowardice and heartlessness (even leaving the family poodle at home alone) is truly something to behold.
But this vapid Trump supporter is not necessarily failing at his job. In comparison with other Republicans, and generally any high-ranking officials in either party, he is also operating at the status quo by abandoning his constituents while they suffer the consequences of conservative ideals, such as individualism (as in, everyone out for themselves), poor public investment in infrastructure and support services, and climate change denial. Cruz’s personal and professional failure as a senator, fleeing to a country that he loves to ridicule, is just that – a failure. The structural and systemic violence at play here, such as poverty, racism, classism, etc. affect those who are already the most vulnerable. This isn’t surprising. It’s the way it goes in US politics and society.
Cruz has continually lobbied against state-funded public health
This is why Cuomo’s situation is also not surprising. The scourge of racial capitalism via institutionalization, quantification, and health disparities has long been a part of New York and the US’s history of public health. Those who have been abused historically in the name of public health, such as the working class, women, people of color, disabled people, queer people, and mentally ill people, are still abused and neglected by public health systems and institutions. Although it does also provide support, I would say it is a complicated, problematic double-edged sword as long as its actions lay in the hands of those in power. Public health should be by the people, for the people.
Since nursing homes for the elderly have become more common, many elderly have also joined the groups of the marginalized in terms of public healthcare, particularly when insurance money can be made off of them. Elderly and disabled folks have been devalued to an even lower level since the pandemic started last year. How many times have you heard, “yeah, but it’s really only dangerous to old people and/or immunocompromised people, so it’s not that bad.” Residents, care workers, and clinicians at nursing homes have long been victimized by poor planning and a profit-over-people (read: capitalist) framework, and now the elderly, disabled, and immunocompromised have not only been reduced to being worthless but have also fallen victim to the state’s own incompetence and negligence.
This allows us to circle back to the SNL sketch, in which the character of Britney Spears jokes about subliminal messaging as a plea for help, as her conservatorship is ongoing. Spears’ case, in real life, demonstrates the dangers of state-sanctioned institutionalization and control of one’s person and/or estate. Nursing homes can also gain conservatorship over elderly or disabled residents, those without next-of-kin or those who are deemed to be unable to make their own decisions. This provides institutions, like nursing homes, immense power over people and profit. Cuomo’s disastrous blunder last March and his failure over the summer to report its consequences show the damage and pain that immense control can incur. Cuomo, in a sense, is the conservator for nursing homes, hospitals, and carceral institutions on a state scale.
The structural and systemic problems, taken from a historicized, intersectional framework, allows us clarity to understand how neglect, surveillance, and abuse in institutions of care are mired with violence. As ableism, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, and ageism are interrelated and co-constitutive, we can surmise that the state and local violence seen in New York’s nursing homes, in Texas’ disaster (which is not of natural cause, but man-made), and even Britney Spears’ conservatorship case point to the myriad ways that these violences manifest. These social and political issues in the news this week are merely a symptom of deeper, more insidious problems, both historical and contextual. We must attend to them or risk continuing this news pattern and the unnecessary suffering they demonstrate. But we can take momentary solace in comedy sketches that make us laugh along the way.