President Biden will use his State of the Union address Tuesday night, in part, to announce steps to protect nursing home residents and hold health care providers accountable for unsafe and substandard care, including by extending inspections and financial sanctions on what the White House says is “bad”. actor nursing”. housing” and “poorly performing facilities”.
More than 1.4 million people in the United States live in more than 15,500 nursing homes, which are reimbursed with taxpayers’ money through two federal programs: Medicare and Medicaid. The pandemic has brought into sharp focus the dangers of living in nursing homes, as well as the challenges they face.
Nursing homes care for some of the country’s most vulnerable people: older and disabled adults, often with chronic underlying conditions. Like all residential facilities, these are places where viruses spread easily. According to the White House, nursing home residents and staff are responsible for about 200,000 of the nearly 950,000 deaths in the United States from Covid-19.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters Monday that Mr. Biden would “unveil new steps to protect seniors and other nursing home residents by cracking down on unsafe nursing homes.” The White House detailed the new initiatives in a fact sheet posted on its website Monday.
These include: improving staffing levels; expanding inspectors and intensifying “checking more of the worst performers”; improving transparency, including by establishing a database to track and identify nursing home operators; and ensuring pandemic preparedness.
The administration also targets private equity firms in the nursing home sector. Citing a March 2020 analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a forward-thinking think tank, the White House said private equity investment in nursing homes had grown to more than $100 billion in 2018, from $5 billion. in 2000, with about 5 percent of all nursing homes now owned by private equity firms.
“Too often, the private equity model has placed profits in front of people — a particularly dangerous model when it comes to the health and safety of vulnerable seniors and people with disabilities,” the White House said.
Katie Smith Sloan, the president and chief executive of LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit providers of aging services, including nursing homes, praised the White House initiative in a statement Monday.
“If the last two years have shown us anything, it is that our country’s inadequate and outdated infrastructure is in dire need of an overhaul,” she said. “And nursing homes are an important part of that infrastructure.”
According to the White House, nursing homes routinely fail to meet federal guidelines. The Government Accountability Office found that from 2013 to 2017, 82 percent of nursing homes inspected had deficiencies in infection prevention and control, including a lack of regular hand washing, the White House said.
“Despite the tens of billions of federal tax dollars flowing into nursing homes each year, too many people continue to provide poor, substandard care that leads to avoidable harm to residents,” the fact sheet read, adding: “Without decisive action now, these unacceptable conditions can get worse.”