Days after President Biden issued a broadside against the nursing home sector for sacrificing “the safety of its residents just to add some dollars to its bottom line,” the nation’s top advocate for nonprofit providers is pushing back with some tough words of her own.
In a guest column published Wednesday in USA Today, which also carried the Biden attack, LeadingAge President and CEO Katie Smith Sloan (pictured) called on the president to temper his tone so as not to destroy the trust her members have worked hard to build.
“We get it. The public needs someone to condemn, someone to push back against. In the narrative the administration is selling, nursing homes have been uniformly cast in the role of villain,” Sloan wrote. “It’s an emotionally compelling tactic to address a complex situation. The trouble is, it’s not accurate.”
“Nonprofit and mission-driven nursing homes, including members of the association I lead, are not the grifters and blame-shifters that the public is being led to believe they are,” she added. “We share the administration’s goal of ensuring America’s older adults and families can receive high quality nursing home care — it’s why nonprofit providers go to work every day.”
The president on Friday tore into nursing home operators in general, though he reserved some of his harshest language for corporate facilities for “taking taxpayer dollars while cutting corners on staffing so they can make big payouts to executives and shareholders.”
Biden, in rallying support for the minimum staffing standards proposed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Friday, also made what Sloan called an “unqualified and unfair slam.” He said the rule, the first of its kind, delivered a message that there will be more “padding profits on the backs of residents and nurses.”
Sloan said that if the administration wants to target certain owner or investor types, then it should align its words and actions with those goals. Instead, she warned, the anti-nursing home rhetoric is undermining the public’s faith in a healthcare setting already beaten and battered by the pandemic.
Now, mission-based providers, many of whom serve a high share of Medicaid patients whose reimbursement often falls below the cost of care delivered to them, face another obstacle of hiring during an ongoing labor crisis.
“Lift us up. Support us. Work with us. We cannot bear the burden of the just-released proposed staffing mandates alone. The costs, estimated to reach into the billions, will be crushing,” Sloan wrote.
“Raise reimbursement rates and inspire states to do the same, so we can afford the care we exist to deliver,” she added. “It’s time for the administration to recognize it must be part of the solution. Only then can we protect and preserve access to high quality care.”
