Lawsuit Aims to Block Nursing Home Staffing Mandate
Trade groups say new minimum care rule will add $6.5B per year to operators' costs.
Nursing home trade associations have filed a lawsuit aiming to block the federal government’s new minimum staffing requirements, calling the new rules “impossible-to-meet standards that will harm thousands of nursing homes.”
Last month, the Centers for Medicare & Medical Services (CMS) finalized the new rules, which go into effect in August and require long-term care facilities to provide 3.48 hours of care per resident per day and to have a registered nurse on duty at all times.
CMS has predicted that 79% of long-term care facilities nationwide will need to increase hiring to meet the requirements in the midst of a shortage of nurses, Healthcare Dive reported.
Plaintiffs including the American Health Care Association (AHCA) and the Texas Health Care Association have filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Texas naming the federal Department of Health & Services and CMS as defendants, calling the new rules “onerous” and claiming CMS exceeded its authority in imposing them.
AHCA and the National Center for Assisted Living project that nursing homes will need to hire an additional 120,000 nurses and nursing aides to comply with the new requirements, adding $6.5B annually to the cost of operating nursing homes.
The trade groups who filed the lawsuit said in the complaint that the new staffing requirements may end up displacing more than 290,000 nursing home residents as operators who have seen their margins squeezed by rising costs and a labor shortage shut down because they can’t afford to comply with the new rules.
“Even by CMS’s low-ball estimate, nursing homes will need to spend more than $40B over the next decade to comply with these new staffing requirements,” the lawsuit says. “Congress has never delegated to CMS the authority to impose such onerous and unachievable mandates on practically every nursing home in the country.”
A spokesperson for HHS said the department will defend the new rules, adding “the status quo in too many nursing homes unacceptably endangers residents and drives workers into other professions,” Healthcare Dive reported.
The new rules for nursing homes are the first update of the federal standard for staffing of these facilities since the 1980s. When it proposed the new standard, HHS said the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed an inadequate level of staffing at nursing homes.
According to CMS data, more than 172,000 nursing home residents have died from COVID-19.