New Orleans       There are few lobbies as powerful as the nursing home owners’ groups in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi.  All of which makes the intervention of federal rules extending some of the same accountability standards that hospitals now face, welcome news.  The fact that the penalties go right to their pocketbooks is even better news.

Here’s the deal on the new rules hitting nursing homes across the country now.  Penalties – or incentives for those doing better – will be meted out to nursing homes based on the frequency of readmission of elderly Medicare patients that are returned to hospitals within thirty days of leaving a skilled nursing home.  The financial penalty can reach up to 2% of the individual Medicare reimbursement rate per patient.  Hospitals already have to measure up to this standard and in recent months nursing homes came under the same regime.

Will this affect many homes?  Yes, indeed!

Kaiser Health News reported an analysis of homes in Louisiana and found that 85% of the 277 skilled nursing facilities in the state would be subject to a penalty based on data from 2015 through 2017.  Not that Louisiana was by itself since the figures for nursing homes in Arkansas and Mississippi was almost exactly the same.  Bottom line:  the vast majority of nursing homes in the three-state area are facing penalties.  The Advocate reports that in New Orleans for example, a dozen facilities will face a penalty and only two will receive small bonuses for doing right.  These are not just problems with for-profit providers.  The three homes overseen by the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans will each receive almost the maximum penalty for each new admission at 1.98% of the possible 2%.

The question of how nursing homes can provide better care to patients, often elderly, sick, and frail, is a constant concern for families and appropriately for public policy.  Reading the comments from administrators of homes that got the good grades under the new rule, they cite getting more thorough information from the hospitals about incoming and prospective patients is key as well as offering preventive care on site.

All of that sounds right, but given the long experience that Local 100, United Labor Unions, has had in representing nursing home workers and observing care conditions firsthand, it will be difficult to fundamentally improve care until staffing levels are adequate to the significant health demands of patients as a first priority.  Being able to retain professional caregivers also means compensating workers commensurate to the value of the service they provide to families and patients.  In the thirty or more years that we have been involved with nursing homes we still see a conflict faced by many home owners and operators between seeing the facilities as real estate developments with a sideline in healthcare as opposed to healthcare facilities that happen to be built on real estate.

We’ve got a long way to go still, but hopefully the application of this new rule will bring some change now that owners will feel the pain of nonperformance in dollars and cents.