Trump Just Made Killing Off The Elderly Even Easier

Earlier this year, the Trump administration rolled back an Obama-era provision that prohibited nursing homes from using forced arbitration contracts if they wanted to remain part of Medicare and Medicaid. According to the administration, "arbitration agreements are, in fact, advantageous to both providers and beneficiaries because they allow for the expeditious resolution of claims without the costs and expense of litigation." The fact that arbitration is always advantageous to the nursing home and the removal of any threat of litigation that could result in a costly judgement for the nursing home is clearly  more relevant but obviously not worth mentioning.

But apparently even that action wasn't enough for the nursing home industry. The nursing home lobby, the American Health Care Association, has asked the Trump administration to restrict the use of fines against nursing homes for health and safety violations. And the Trump administration is, of course, willing to comply. According to a Trump administration official, "Rather than spending quality time with their patients, the providers are spending time complying with regulations that get in the way of caring for their patients and doesn’t increase the quality of care they provide." I'm not sure that those patients who have died because they received substandard care or were badly neglected would agree. But, then again, they can't sue anyway now.

According to the NY Times, one of the changes was to reduce the use of daily fines, fines for each day that the violation occurred, even those days before being uncovered by an inspection. Under this new scenario, the nursing home would be fined only $21,000 in the death of patient who died when the nursing home failed to monitor or treat an injury for 28 days. Under the old scenario, the nursing would have been fined over $280,000 which covered all 28 days of the violation.

Most nursing homes are already a disaster when it comes to health and safety violations. A recent Kaiser study found that 74% of all nursing homes had been fined for failures in infection control over a four year period. Even those nursing homes that fall under stricter and continued scrutiny, a process called special focus status, revert back to their old ways when that scrutiny is lifted. An earlier study showed that over half of the nursing homes that were covered by that status harmed or seriously jeopardized patients in a three year period after returning to normal monitoring. We can only imagine how bad things will get now that these homes have even less incentive to provide adequate, not even quality, care. As with most Trump actions these days, people will die needlessly.