Congress Must Protect Staffing Standards in Nursing Homes

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It’s a fact: the lives of America’s most vulnerable seniors, including many here in Idaho, are at risk because the unchecked nursing home industry chooses profits over providing enough staff to meet basic levels of care. For years, seniors in under-staffed nursing homes have been forced to sit in soiled underwear, suffer painful bed sores, miss life-saving medications, and worse. When the nursing home industry can center profits over people, nursing home residents pay the price – sometimes with their lives.

In April, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) finalized minimum staffing standards for nursing homes to help ensure America’s most vulnerable seniors receive basic levels of safe care. The final safe staffing standard ensures that nursing home residents receive a minimum level of care. Under the standard, nursing homes are required to provide at least three hours and 29 minutes of care each day to each resident. This includes at least two hours and 27 minutes from a nurse aide and 33 minutes from a registered nurse. Furthermore, a registered nurse must be on site 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to provide skilled care. Non-rural nursing homes get three years to gradually implement the new standards. Rural nursing homes get five years.

These minimum staffing standards are a necessary step toward improving the quality of care in nursing facilities. CMS data shows that nursing homes with higher levels of nursing care have better overall ratings, better health inspection ratings, and fewer instances of abuse. AARP advocated for minimum staffing standards, which will apply to most of the nation’s 15,000 nursing homes, including here in Idaho.

The standard hasn’t even gone into effect yet and some members of Congress are trying to destroy these long-overdue protections. The House and Senate recently introduced bad bills that would block the nursing home staffing standards from implementation. As if that isn’t dangerous and heartless enough, if the process being used to block the standards – a Congressional Review Act – is successful, it means rules about minimum staffing standards for nursing homes can never be issued again. The unacceptable result: perpetually poor, unsafe levels of basic care for our most vulnerable seniors.

By definition, a nursing home is intended to provide care for those who can’t care for themselves. In other care facilities such as hospitals, there are strict standards to ensure that the tax dollars funding Medicare and Medicaid-covered care are being used for medical care as intended. Why should the nursing home industry, which receives $80 billion annually from taxpayers through Medicaid and Medicare, be any different? It’s commonsense that a standard is needed to define the minimum level of care paid for taxpayers.