Dear Members:

No doubt by now, you have heard about the Biden Administration’s comprehensive nursing home reform proposal: Perhaps you watched or listened to the State of the Union message earlier this week in which President Biden alluded to reform; perhaps you read about it in the newspaper or online; perhaps you have discussed it with a colleague.

Given everything that our sector has gone through and continues to experience, several reactions may come to mind:

• Disappointment;
• Frustration;
• Anger; and/or
• The sense that the people proposing this are absolutely tone deaf to the incredible efforts LTC providers have undertaken in the last 2 years to combat a once-in-a-century pandemic.

Click HERE to view the White House fact sheet that lays out in great detail what is being proposed. The proposal is organized into five parts:

• “Ensuring taxpayer dollars support nursing homes that provide safe, adequate and dignified care”: Included in this part are things like imposing minimum staffing requirements, promoting single-occupancy rooms, strengthening the value-based purchasing program and reducing the inappropriate use of antipsychotic medications.
• “Enhancing accountability and oversight”: Included in this part are things like increasing funding to state survey agencies to increase survey activity, increasing the intensity of special focus surveys, increasing per-day civil monetary penalties and other enforcement remedies, and redirecting regional Quality Improvement Organizations (QIO) so that improving nursing home quality is a core focus.
• “Increasing Transparency”: Included in this part are things like creating a database to track owners who have had health and safety issues in their facilities, transparency in corporate ownership, and examining the role of private equity in our sector.
• “Creating Pathways to Good-paying Jobs with the Free and Fair Choice to Join a Union”: Included in this part are things like making nurse aide training more affordable, working with states on retention initiatives including ensuring that nursing home employees are paid adequately, and launching a national career ladder (“pathways”) initiative.
• “Ensuring Pandemic and Emergency Preparedness in Nursing Homes”: Included in this part are things like continued COVID testing, continued focus on vaccinations and boosters, strengthening on-site infection preventionist presence and enhancing emergency preparedness requirements.

Okay, now that you have reviewed this overview and maybe have read the entire enclosed document, how are you feeling? More disappointed? More frustrated? More infuriated? Perhaps you have concluded that members of the Biden Administration are clueless to your and your staff colleagues’ reality on the ground?

So, what are we going to do about it? 

Your Executive Committee and Board of Directors will be meeting early next week. This proposal will be a centerpiece of the meeting.

We will work with our colleagues at the American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living on a coordinated “long game” legislative, regulatory, and political giving strategy. Importantly, we must emphasize the value of seeking input from providers to inform CMS rulemaking and/or Congressional legislative action.

We will engage Wisconsin’s congressional delegation to make sure that they are educated about the great work you and your colleagues do every day for the most vulnerable among us. We will also engage them constructively and respectfully about our concerns on the Biden proposal.

We will monitor closely to ensure that any similar proposals to make the survey environment more punitive than it already is gain zero momentum at the state level to negatively impact our nursing home and/or assisted living members.

Importantly, we will ask you, our members, to get engaged at the local level to tell your story and also to contribute what you can to our 2022 political giving campaign so together, we can collectively elevate the voices of LTC providers in Wisconsin with key decisionmakers.

Finally, I ask that you do one more very important thing: Please continue to do the great work that you do each and every day. Your residents and your staff colleagues need you now more than ever before. The Biden Proposal? Well folks, this is going to be a marathon; not a sprint. But we’ve got this! We will prevail for our residents, for our staffs and for our businesses.

As always, we encourage you to reach out to the association to share your thoughts on this new federal policy initiative, or any other issues of importance to you. We are here to advocate on your behalf, and we are best equipped to do it when we hear directly from you, the member, to help shape and inform our approach to advocating for your best interests.

Thank you so very much for all that you do each and every day. Take good care.

Respectfully,

William R. Abrams

Chief Executive Officer