Exclusive: Dem bill would revive nursing home staff minimums
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Illustration: Gabriella Turrisi/Axios
Senate Democrats on Thursday are reviving a Biden-era effort to set the first-ever national minimum staffing requirements for nursing homes, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: The Trump administration last year rescinded a policy that would have created baseline staffing rules for long-term care settings in response to widespread reports of patient harm due to understaffing.
- Administrators pulled the rule after nursing home executives donated millions to a Trump-aligned super PAC, the New York Times reported last month. A federal judge in Texas had also previously tossed out the regulation.
Zoom in: A bill led by Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden of Oregon would require nursing homes to have a registered nurse on site 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
- Each resident in a nursing home would also get at least three and a half hours of nursing care per day, his office told Axios.
- Both mandates were included in the Biden-era regulation.
The intrigue: The bill would designate $800 million annually for state inspections of nursing homes and other health providers, and to support enforcement activities.
- It also requires that states reinvest a "significant portion" of fines levied on nursing homes back into long-term care workforce development.
- Unions representing nurses and home care workers, along with senior citizen advocacy groups, have endorsed the bill, per Wyden's office.
The other side: The nursing home industry has called staffing mandates unworkable without more funding.
- "This unrealistic regulation threatened to close nursing homes and displace vulnerable residents," Clif Porter, president and CEO of the American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living, said in a December statement after the rule was scrapped.
- Republicans in Congress disagreed with the Biden minimum staffing requirement, too, and they're unlikely to back this new bill in its current form.
