December 6, 2023 Washington, DC — Commenting on the Senate introduction of the Protecting Rural Seniors’ Access to Care Act (S. 3410), a companion bill to H.R. 5796 of the same name, a top aging services leader urged Congress to prioritize action on America’s caregiving crisis and praised the Senate bill’s sponsor, Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska.
Katie Smith Sloan, president and CEO of LeadingAge, the association of nonprofit providers of aging services, including nursing homes, said: “Ensuring that older Americans have access to quality care in nursing homes is a widely shared goal. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) proposed nursing home staffing requirement is the wrong approach. By prohibiting this unrealistic and unfunded mandate, the Protecting Rural Seniors’ Access to Care Act will help to ensure older adults can get the care and services they need and also fend off more nursing home closures. It further offers a path to much-needed solutions by establishing a panel to address workforce shortages that are chronic throughout the sector. We applaud Sen. Fischer’s effort to get this right for all Americans.”
LeadingAge’s support for passage of the Senate and House bills to prohibit implementation of CMS’ proposed nursing home staffing rule is the association’s latest push to ensure older adults and families can access critical care and services not only in nursing homes, but in every care setting and community.
At the association’s recent annual meeting in Chicago, in advance of the Nov. 6 comment deadline, Sloan urged action from members, emphasizing that the proposed unfunded staffing mandate would make the current care shortage older Americans face even more dire. If implemented as proposed, the mandate would mean nearly 16,000 additional registered nurses and more than 75,000 nurse aides would be needed nationwide at a cost of anywhere between $4.2 and $7.1 billion in the first year—at a time of well-documented, widely acknowledged shortages of qualified workers in both those categories. Over 1200 LeadingAge members, who serve older adults and families in nursing homes as well as other care settings and communities, submitted comments to CMS.
“Sen. Fischer and Rep. Fischbach, and their Congressional colleagues who support these bills recognize that the Biden Administration needs to get this right by addressing the underlying workforce and reimbursement challenges facing long-term care,” Sloan said. “The President announced a goal of ensuring equitable access to quality care for older Americans and families—but in addition to the ill-conceived proposed nursing home staffing mandates, the administration recently also cut payments for Medicare home health by nearly 3% for CY2024, on top of last year’s reduction of nearly 4%. Both of these actions will put even more of a squeeze on the capacity of providers across the aging services continuum—including the mission-driven, nonprofit members of LeadingAge—and make their current challenges of finding and retaining qualified staff that much more difficult. And access to care for older adults and families with a wide range of needs across the country will grow scarcer.
The shortage of caregiving professionals is a crisis that must be addressed with a robust approach to funding, support, and policy changes. Solutions range from raising Medicaid reimbursement rates that cover the cost of care to investments and policies (including immigration reform) that increase the pool of potential workers to sustained prioritization of our too-long-ignored professional caregivers who serve older adults and families.
LeadingAge members and state partners are sharing their on-the-ground experiences with members of Congress this month in a series of in-person and virtual meetings, to explain existing workforce shortages and reimbursement challenges, and outline the potential impact of CMS’s proposed staffing mandate. Our lawmakers must understand the importance of the Protecting Rural Seniors’ Access to Care Act and legislation like it. We need to prohibit the rule’s implementation and focus instead on workforce development opportunities.”
