Trump Administration Is Relaxing Oversight of Nursing Homes

[Zorro]

The Trump administration has been working to relax regulations governing America’s nursing homes, including rules meant to curb deadly infections among elderly residents.

The main federal regulator overseeing nursing homes proposed the rule changes last summer, before the coronavirus pandemic highlighted the vulnerability of nursing homes to fast-spreading diseases. The push followed a spate of lobbying and campaign contributions by people in the nursing-home industry, according to public records and interviews.

The coronavirus has killed 13 residents at a nursing home in Washington State; dozens more residents and employees there have fallen ill. Seeking to prevent further contagion, some states, including New York, have banned most nonmedical personnel from setting foot inside nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, which nationally have about 2.5 million residents.

Last July, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or C.M.S., set in motion a plan to weaken rules imposed by the Obama administration that required every nursing home to employ at least one specialist in preventing infections. The proposed rules — which the agency is completing and has the power to enact — eliminate the requirement to have even a part-time infection specialist on staff. Instead, the Trump administration would require that anti-infection specialists spend “sufficient time at the facility.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/business/trump-administration-nursing-homes.html

[lettucebe]

1. This needs more attention - he was working on loosening restrictions meant to protect elderly

I read about this a month or more ago and was incensed then. I wish this would get more attention. Another example of how completely inept Trump and all his enablers are. They could not care less about anything but their own pockets

[Karadeniz]

3. We wouldn't want to restrict the owners from making every last cent.

[Igel]

4. Relevant text here.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/42/483.80

As in most things, I'm of two minds.

I've seen large nursing homes. This is more than necessary in those cases.

My mother was in a "nursing home" that was a single-family house in a neighborhood full of single-family houses. It had 8 residents at most. The owner had few employees--one was present at all times (including overnight), during the day there were usually two. At that point, the requirement almost amounts to a judgment that such places should be discouraged.

[KPN]

5. Mmmhmmmm .... another example of "draining

the swamp.”