Novi Times

State Sen. Jim Runestad (R-White Lake) spoke in favor of Senate Bill 956, which would require elderly people with COVID-19 to be placed in health care facilities with other infected patients, rather than in nursing homes.

Runestad compared Florida’s handling of the crisis to Michigan’s. “Florida has about 150,000 nursing home patients,” Runestad told the Michigan Senate in a YouTube video. “Michigan has about 38,000.”

Florida had 1,637 nursing home deaths from COVID-19 while Michigan had 1,947 deaths, according to Runestad. He said the discrepancy in numbers is because Florida set aside separate facilities for infected seniors, rather than putting them in nursing homes with other patients.

Sen. Jim Runestad | #MiSenateGOP

“They were not putting infected patients in with non-infected patients like the state of Michigan did,” he told the Michigan Senate. “It was a deadly decision here in the state of Michigan for our most vulnerable, infirm individuals.”

Nursing homes in Michigan asked for a policy similar to Florida’s, Runestad said. “It was denied by the governor,” he said in the YouTube video. “This is a bill that absolutely has to be passed right now to save and protect these seniors.”

The legislation passed the Senate on June 24 and now goes on to the House. If it passes the House, it would then go to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for her signature.

All but two Senate Democrats opposed the bill, arguing that it would interfere with right of patients and families to make their own decisions on health care, MLive reported.

MLive called Senate passage of the bill a “rebuke” of Whitmer’s executive order that allowed “otherwise stable COVID-19 patients to be transferred to nursing homes with residents who aren’t infected, so long as the COVID-19 patients were isolated.”

Under the legislation, patients would be transferred starting Sept. 15 to health care facilities devoted exclusively to COVID-19.

The state would be required to set up separate COVID-19 facilities in each of the eight heath care regions in Michigan, and those patients would not be admitted into hospitals and nursing homes that don't have separate areas prepared for them.