Political donations and repeal of the nursing home staffing rule
For decades, studies have linked insufficient staffing to poor care in America’s 15,000 nursing homes, says The New York Times.
The top item in this blog on Monday discussed the Trump administration’s repeal of a Biden-era Medicare regulation to require increased staffing levels.
President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act prohibited Medicare from implementing the Biden staffing standards before 2034.
But some in the industry wanted to make the rule go away permanently and made donations totaling nearly $4.8 million to MAGA Inc., a super PAC devoted to Trump and run by his allies, the Times says.
In December, the Department of Health and Human Services announced repeal of the rule.
There’s no evidence linking the decision to scrap the rule to the nursing home industry’s donations or its lobbying of Trump, says the Times.
“But the industry’s fund-raising for MAGA Inc. highlights the eagerness of corporate America to curry favor with a president who has repeatedly used the levers of government to reward donors and allies — and to punish critics. Mr. Trump has remained keenly interested in fund-raising, keeping close tabs on who has donated,” the Times says.
A 2024 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that more than 60 percent of nursing home profits were hidden in a maze of transactions among related corporations, says the Times. The report showed that if those funds were spent on staff, nearly 76 percent of facilities could meet the new standard for 24-hour registered nurse coverage.
In a report on Florida’s nursing home system, AARP Florida found that between 2019 and 2023, 425 nursing homes changed ownership, including 156 facilities linked to private equity. Following their acquisition by private equity, these 156 facilities reduced staffing by 13 percent.
The report says: “We emphasize that private investor groups may have been involved in more than 156 of the 425 facilities that changed ownership between 2019 and 2024. However, in the process of examining records for all 425 facilities, we discovered how difficult it is to determine who or what controls many nursing homes in Florida today.”
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