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Diving brief:
- Nursing Home Groups having continued HHS and CMS to block the Biden administration's new nursing home staffing mandate, which is deeply unpopular with the industry.
- Under the rule, finalized last month and expected to take effect in August, long-term care facilities must provide 3.48 hours of care per resident per day and have a registered nurse on duty at all times. The CMS predicts that 79% of the nation's long-term care facilities would need to increase staffing to meet requirements.
- The lead plaintiffs — the American Health Care Association and the Texas Health Care Association — say the rule's “onerous” requirements will worsen the industry's staffing crisis and could disrupt patients' access to care in the lawsuit filed in Federal Court last week.
Dive overview:
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted long-standing issues with quality of care in nursing homes, which can be remedy this by increasing the workforceaccording to the Biden administration.
Current staffing standards, which were codified in the late 1980srequire homes to have a registered nurse on-site for at least eight consecutive hours, seven days per week and “sufficient” licensed nursing staff to meet patient care needs.
However, CMS wants to tie specific hour requirements to the new staffing standards — a move that the plaintiffs say is a “disconcerting and unexplained deviation” from policy.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, argues that the new rule not only clarifies the requirements for providers, but triples them.
As a result, CMS is overstepping its authority and creating “impossible to meet standards that will harm thousands of nursing homes,” the plaintiffs claim.
The AHCA and the National Center for Assisted Living project that nursing homes will need to hire 102,000 additional nurses and aides to comply with the rule, at a total cost of 6.5 billion dollars in additional expense every year.
Homes that cannot afford such costs could close, potentially displacing more than 290,000 current residents, the groups say.
“Even under CMS's low estimate, nursing homes will have to spend more than $40 billion over the next decade to comply with these new personnel requirements,” the lawsuit states. “Congress never delegated to CMS the authority to impose such onerous and unworkable mandates on virtually every nursing home in the country.”
HHS and CMS intend to defend the rule, according to an HHS spokesperson.
“The status quo in too many nursing homes puts residents at unacceptable risk and pushes workers into other professions,” the spokesperson said.