The American Health Care Association President and CEO Mark Parkinson called on the entire nursing home industry to fight against the “offensive” nursing home reform package laid out by the Biden administration this month as rhetoric around the reform continues to ramp up.
Parkinson and other health care officials feel lawmakers are “pointing the finger” and blaming nursing homes for the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic at a time when the industry sits in the best spot clinically it’s been “in a long time.”
“Case counts among staff and among residents remain really low, hospitalizations and deaths, fortunately, are very low and on the clinical side, things are actually pretty good,” Parkinson said in a video message released on Thursday.
David Gifford, AHCA’s chief medical officer, expressed similar disappointment and said “it was time to stop blaming nursing homes “for a one-in-a-century global pandemic,” in an op-ed published in USA Today following the publication’s report on spikes in Covid deaths at Trilogy Health Services’ facilities.
The former head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Seema Verma, last week similarly expressed disappointment in the proposals, calling the measures “short-sighted.”
“A modern, results-oriented approach that focuses on outcomes has a better chance of improving quality than the president’s outdated policy prescriptions,” she wrote in op-ed published last Monday in Modern Healthcare.
Placing the blame on nursing homes after the number of “terrible decisions” made by both Republicans and Democrats relating to the sector is “offensive,” Parkinson said in the video.
While nearly 25% of all COVID-19 deaths in the United States were residents and staff in nursing homes, as referenced in the White House’s fact sheet on the proposed reform, Parkinson didn’t feel operators were the ones “at fault.”
He pointed to “study after study” showing that community spread of the virus and politicians not making the right decisions about how to keep transmission low in communities, are what caused the spread in nursing homes.
Parkinson rallies nursing home operators to Capitol Hill
He called on the industry to fight back on some of the ideas coming from the state and federal governments in two ways: by advocating for the industry at state capitols and on Capitol Hill, and by submitting comments to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
AHCA is hosting a congressional briefing event in Washington, D.C. in June to provide an update on the biggest policy updates in long-term and post-acute care, as well as giving providers opportunities to meet with members of Congress.
Parkinson called this year’s event “the most important congressional briefing in nursing home history.”
“The proposals that have been announced will be rolled out slowly over the next year or two. But the offensive ones and terrible ideas deserve a massive response from the sector,” he said.
Parkinson said such responses in the past, including one during the Obama administration where more than 13,000 comments to new requirements were submitted, have slowed down and shaped proposals for the better.
He also referenced the White House’s decision to reverse what was originally a nursing home specific vaccine mandate to make it apply to all health care workers.
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