“Former CMS leader rips Biden’s nursing home reform plans,” by Danielle Brown, McKnight’s LTC News
Quote:
“President Joe Biden’s proposals to reform America’s nursing homes are ‘short-sighted’ and may push providers over the edge during the ongoing workforce crisis, the former leader of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said Monday. Biden’s reform plan was unveiled earlier this month. It includes more than 20 initiatives to improve quality of care, with minimum staffing requirements a top priority. The effort, however, could ‘decimate’ the nursing home industry if it fails to address underlying funding and workforce challenges, warned Seema Verma, CMS administrator during the Trump administration.”
LTC Comment, Stephen A. Moses, President, Center for Long-Term Care Reform:
Government tried the same unfunded, punitive intimidation of nursing homes in the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987. All they got were lawsuits demanding higher Medicaid reimbursement supported by the Boren Amendment, a 1980 rule that put a floor under rates. Congress later repealed Boren leaving no limit on how low rates could go. So here we are 35 years later with the same problems and the same “solution” proposed. Prognosis? Same policy, same result: poor quality resulting from inadequate Medicaid rates.
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