Tag: nursing homes

“They Can’t Hold The Nursing Homes Responsible”

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.dailyposter.com/p/they-cant-hold-the-nursing-homes

Excerpt:

Attorneys insist nursing home negligence cases are not designed to target nursing home employees and other frontline workers caring for facility residents during the pandemic. As Mosher notes, “In most cases, these people are just as much victims as the residents.” 

Instead, the lawsuits are going after nursing home owners and operators, a population that has become increasingly dominated by private equity firms, shell companies, and other secretive for-profit operations, which make staffing and other decisions about quality of care in boardrooms and corporate offices far removed from those who are impacted.

The results of these cases are not about simply scoring million-dollar settlements and padding lawyers’ pockets, say legal experts. Torts and class action suits are an important deterrent to bad behaviors in an industry that has become known for lax oversight. 

Author(s): Joel Warner

Publication Date: 2 March 2021

Publication Site: The Daily Poster

Diverse Population Uses Nursing Homes Less

Mary Pat Campbell
Diverse Population Uses Nursing Homes Less

Excerpt:

Eight states have seen the biggest drops in nursing home use: Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Many of these states have experienced fast growth in their minority populations or have more generous state allocations of Medicaid funds for long-term care services delivered in the home.

Growing diversity is actually the second-biggest reason for lower nursing home residence, accounting for one-fifth of the decline, according to the study, which was funded by the U.S. Social Security Administration and is based on U.S. Census data.

Publication Date: 25 February 2021

Publication Site: Squared Away Blog

Why Cuomo Should Be Worried About a Federal Probe

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-cuomo-should-be-worried-about-a-federal-probe-11613945987

Excerpt:

What caught the Justice Department’s eye was Gov. Cuomo’s claim that New York’s nursing-home deaths were lower than many other states’ and that his March 25 order didn’t contribute to the extremely high number of New Yorkers who died from Covid. Given the virus’s disproportionate effect on the elderly, sick and frail, this seemed unlikely. On Aug. 26, Justice’s Civil Rights Division, relying on its jurisdiction to investigate government-run facilities under the federal Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, asked the Cuomo administration for data on New York’s publicly run nursing homes, which account for less than 5% of nursing homes in the state.

In September, New York produced data showing it had underreported Covid deaths in government-run nursing homes by a third. The undercounting appeared to be due to several factors. First, when a nursing-home resident who contracted Covid died after being transported to a hospital for treatment, New York didn’t count it as a “nursing-home death.” Second, New York didn’t include deaths occurring before the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began requiring Covid reporting from nursing homes in mid-May. CMS made reporting prior Covid deaths optional, and New York apparently elected to keep the information to itself.

Author(s): John B. Daukas

Publication Date: 21 February 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

State closes COVID recovery facilities as nursing home cases continue to fall

Mary Pat Campbell
State closes COVID recovery facilities as nursing home cases continue to fall

Excerpt:

The state is closing the two COVID-19 recovery centers for nursing home residents in Meriden and Torrington because the number of infections has fallen to the point that they are no longer necessary.

“Athena Health Care Systems was pleased to partner with the state of Connecticut to operate COVID recovery centers in Meriden and Torrington to help some of our most vulnerable patients recover as well as keep our nursing home residents safe,” Athena Director of Marketing Timothy Brown said.

“We are pleased to say that we are now able to close both recovery centers. It really is positive news — it means that things are going in the right direction when it comes to this pandemic and that the recovery center model has worked.”

Author(s): DAVE ALTIMARI

Publication Date: 18 February 2021

Publication Site: CT Mirror

Does Private Equity Investment in Healthcare Benefit Patients? Evidence from Nursing Homes

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.nber.org/papers/w28474

Abstract:

The past two decades have seen a rapid increase in Private Equity (PE) investment in healthcare, a sector in which intensive government subsidy and market frictions could lead high-powered for-profit incentives to be misaligned with the social goal of affordable, quality care. This paper studies the effects of PE ownership on patient welfare at nursing homes. With administrative patient-level data, we use a within-facility differences-in-differences design to address non-random targeting of facilities. We use an instrumental variables strategy to control for the selection of patients into nursing homes. Our estimates show that PE ownership increases the short-term mortality of Medicare patients by 10%, implying 20,150 lives lost due to PE ownership over our twelve-year sample period. This is accompanied by declines in other measures of patient well-being, such as lower mobility, while taxpayer spending per patient episode increases by 11%. We observe operational changes that help to explain these effects, including declines in nursing staff and compliance with standards. Finally, we document a systematic shift in operating costs post-acquisition toward non-patient care items such as monitoring fees, interest, and lease payments.

Author(s): Atul Gupta, Sabrina T. Howell, Constantine Yannelis & Abhinav Gupta

Publication Date: February 2021

Publication Site: NBER

How Wall Street Kills Grandma

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.dailyposter.com/p/how-wall-street-kills-grandma

Excerpt:

The study from University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago and New York University researchers evaluated data from 15,000 nursing homes across the United States, alongside Medicare patient data, to assess the impacts of private equity ownership on patient outcomes. In all, the researchers found that the deaths accounted for “about 160,000 lost life-years.”

Private equity firms typically take over existing corporations with borrowed or investor money and then impose cost-cutting measures to maximize revenues — often in preparation for selling off the newly stripped down firms at a profit. In the health care sector, private equity buyouts have been associated with lower staffing levels, more frequent citations for health and safety violations, shortages of supplies like ventilators that are crucial for COVID patients, and other failings tied to the constant imperative to cut costs.

In all, 70 percent of nursing homes currently operate as for-profit businesses, far more than other healthcare facilities. Only about one quarter of hospitals, for example, are for profit.

Author(s): Julia Rock, David Sirota

Publication Date: 22 February 2021

Publication Site: The Daily Poster

Errors in covid data reveal unreliable tracking system for nursing homes

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://triblive.com/news/pennsylvania/errors-in-covid-data-reveal-unreliable-tracking-system-for-nursing-homes/

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Case and death counts on the Department of Health’s website often mismatch what facilities report independently, or what is reported by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a federal agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Sometimes, the number of cases or deaths reported in a facility exceeds the number of residents altogether. Occasionally, the cumulative totals will fluctuate up and down from week to week, as if deceased residents are coming back to life. Often, the fields show “no data” at all.

“It’s not getting any better,” said Zach Shamberg, president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Healthcare Association. “We’ve lost faith, unfortunately, as an industry, in much of the data that’s been collected, reproduced and distributed on a state or federal website. We just don’t trust it at this point.”

While facilities are inundated with information, the state Department of Health also is struggling with an overload of covid-19 data, a health department spokesman said. The workload is compounded by an understaffed team of workers who all have other responsibilities. But at the end of the day, he said, the data is provided for the public’s benefit.

Author(s): Teghan Simonton

Publication Date: 3 January 2021

Publication Site: Trib Live

COVID-19: Cuomo Calls For Nursing Home Reform Amid Federal Probe, Increasing Pressure

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://dailyvoice.com/new-york/northsalem/news/covid-19-cuomo-calls-for-nursing-home-reform-amid-federal-probe-increasing-pressure/803613/

Graphic:

Excerpt:

With pressure coming from both sides of the aisle into investigating New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, he has vowed sweeping reform as part of the 30-day amendments.

Cuomo announced reforms to improve the health, quality of life, and safety of nursing home residents to ensure that “facilities prioritize patient care over profits.”

“You can’t say to a nursing home that ‘either you can buy new beds, or you can make more money,’ ” Cuomo said during a COVID-19 briefing on Friday, Feb. 19. “It’s not a matter of hiring more staff or helping people or making more money.

Author(s): Zak Fallia

Publication Date: 19 February 2021

Publication Site: Daily Voice

Empire Center Rebuttal to NY Health Department Pushback

Mary Pat Campbell
Empire Center Rebuttal to NY Health Department Pushback

Excerpt:

“The salient policy question isn’t whether the March 25th memo introduced COVID into nursing homes, but whether it contributed to higher infection and mortality rates.

“The department’s comments show that it either doesn’t understand statistics, or is willfully ignoring our findings. Our analysis does, in fact, show a consistent relationship between transfers from hospitals to nursing homes and COVID fatalities. These findings were robust to several statistical assumptions.

“Our report included a statewide statistical analysis, which showed that transfers were associated with deaths at the 99 percent confidence level. Those statewide estimates are the ones we used to estimate that transfers were associated with hundreds of additional deaths. In digging a bit deeper, we hypothesized a differential effect upstate and downstate, which was then corroborated by our analysis.

Author(s): press release

Publication Date: 19 February 2021

Publication Site: Empire Center for Public Policy

COVID-positive Admissions Were Correlated with Higher Death Rates in New York Nursing Homes

Mary Pat Campbell
COVID-positive Admissions Were Correlated with Higher Death Rates in New York Nursing Homes

Excerpt:

The admission of coronavirus-positive patients into New York nursing homes under March 25 guidance from the New York State Department of Health was associated with a statistically significant increase in resident deaths.

The data show that each new admission of a COVID-positive patient correlated with .09 additional deaths, with a margin of error (MOE) of plus or minus 0.05.

Further, admitting any number of new COVID-positive patients was associated with an average of 4.2 additional deaths per facility (MOE plus or minus 1.9).

The effect was more pronounced upstate—possibly because the pandemic was less severe in that region at the time, so that even a single exposure would have had a larger impact on the level of risk.

Author(s): Bill Hammond, Ian Kingsbury

Publication Date: 18 February 2021

Publication Site: Empire Center for Public Policy

False Hero of the Pandemic

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.city-journal.org/cuomo-under-fire-for-hiding-nursing-home-deaths

Excerpt:

Between March 25 and May 10, 2020, an advisory from Cuomo’s Department of Health (DOH) compelled nursing homes to readmit hospitalized Covid-19 patients without checking if they still had active infection. Health experts cautioned that the policy could lead to additional deaths by introducing infected people into closed facilities where those most vulnerable to the disease—the elderly and infirm—live. Cuomo’s responses ranged from the devil—aka the Trump administration—made me do it; to we didn’t force anything—facilities had discretion to turn down admissions; to “nothing to see here”—the policy didn’t increase the number of deaths; to “who cares” where they died.

Cuomo repeatedly and falsely claimed that the policy was directed by federal guidance. A July DOH report (now revised) also claimed that the nursing-home admission policy was following federal guidance that homes “should accept residents with COVID-19.” In fact, the federal guidance was permissive, not proscriptive: “A nursing home can accept a resident diagnosed with COVID-19 . . . as long as the facility can follow CDC guidance for Transmission-Based Precautions” (emphasis added).

Author(s): Joel Zinberg

Publication Date: 16 February 2021

Publication Site: City Journal

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo under investigation for nursing home deaths

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/york-gov-andrew-cuomo-investigation-nursing-home-deaths/story?id=75960261

Excerpt:

The full scope of the investigation is not immediately clear, but the sources said there was a particular interest in nursing homes, which have been a source of increasing frustration for Cuomo.

Last week, an aide conceded the administration withheld the nursing home death toll from state lawmakers out of fear it would be used against the state by the Trump administration.

….

The controversy over nursing home deaths has dogged Cuomo for months. At the onset of the pandemic, state health officials directed nursing homes to accept residents recovering from the virus as they were discharged from hospitals.

The directive was rescinded several weeks later, but Cuomo faced criticism that it contributed to a high level of deaths in nursing homes. The governor said he based the decision on federal guidance at the time and insisted staff members, not residents discharged from hospitals, brought coronavirus into nursing homes.

Author(s): Aaron Katersky

Publication Date: 17 February 2021

Publication Site: ABC News