GOP Lawmakers Want LaSalle Veterans' Home Reforms
A COVID-19 outbreak at the LaSalle Veterans’ Home claimed the lives of 36 veterans. Two GOP lawmakers are asking for reforms and a new, independent investigation.
About four months after a COVID-19 outbreak at the state-run LaSalle Veterans’ Home, two Republican lawmakers say they want an independent investigation into the COVID-19 outbreak at the LaSalle Veterans’ Home, which killed 36 residents of the facility.
Sen. Sue Rezin (R-Morris) and Rep. David Welter (R-Morris) have introduced pieces of legislation in their chambers.
Welter is requesting the independent Auditor General look into the outbreak. Currently, the investigation is being conducted by the Inspector General of the Department of Human Services, who is hired and fired by the Pritzker administration.
“[Pritzker’s] Inspector General [from the Department of Human Services] is reviewing this and is going to come back with his findings,” said Welter. “Frankly, that’s not an independent person. He’s hired by the Governor and at the will of the Governor. The Auditor General is appointed by the House and Senate and that is where we want to see this investigation go.”
The Democratic chair of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, Rep. Stephanie Kifowit (D-Oswego), has signed on to Welter’s bill as a co-sponsor.
Meanwhile, Rezin has introduced legislation in the Senate to adopt recommendations from the Auditor General following a 2015 Legionnaire’s Outbreak at the Quincy Veterans’ Home.
None of those recommendations are particularly controversial, like narrowing the definition of an outbreak to include two or more cases of an infectious disease within 48 hours, requiring the home administrator to notify IDVA and IDPH as soon as an outbreak has occurred, requiring IDVA and IDPH to conduct an on-site visit within one business day of being notified of an outbreak, and posting the findings of the on-site inspection on their website.
“They knew specifically what needed to change and the Department of Public Health signed off on the Auditor General’s report from the Quincy findings,” Rezin said. “It’s very troubling that these recommendations have not been implemented to date with this administration. If it had, we would have been in the site on day three at the LaSalle Veterans’ Home and caught all of these errors that were happening within the home. We could have stopped the outbreak and we could have saved veterans’ lives.”
Both Rezin and Welter expressed their frustrations that when the outbreak was detected on November 1st, a team from IDPH didn’t visit the facility for 11 days. When it did inspect the site, it found ineffective PPE and hand sanitizer that didn’t kill the coronavirus in posted in dispensers in many rooms. In the 11 days between the outbreak being declared and IDPH visiting the site, more than 100 residents of the home got sick and 12 died.
IDPH did not respond to a message from The Illinoize Monday.
