Deregulation is Unsafe
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently told the nursing home industry that more relief from so-called red tape is coming.
While the industry may view news of further deregulation as a win after years of playing the victim, they should be careful what they wish for.
Everyone suffers when regulations are stripped, not just residents.
When a crisis takes place in a nursing home with few regulations, nurses are stretched too thin, administrators must deal with a staffing model they didn’t design, directors of nursing have no policies to point to when things went wrong, and owners of good facilities get painted with the same brush as the bad ones because the industry as a whole failed to police itself.
The long-term care industry has serious problems, chief among them public perception problem. Decades of deregulation and a devastating pandemic have only made the problem worse.
While nursing home operators may view regulations as burdensome, in actuality, they are designed to protect people. Not only do they protect residents, but also staff members who perform their jobs well.
As critical regulations have already fallen, nursing homes have only fallen further into their disreputable state.
With no federal staffing floor, facilities provide only the numbers they wish to provide. These can be wrong, too, and people are often left guessing at what the real numbers are.
In addition, no ownership transparency requirements mean that it is difficult to determine who is at fault when issues arise. Instead of the response being targeted, families get angry, the media shows up, Congress holds hearings, and the good operators, administrators, and facility leaders get caught in it right alongside the bad ones.
Once the industry realizes that deregulation only creates more chaos, not less, the solution becomes clear: nursing homes can build the trust they need by following regulations, not advocating against them.
In this frighteningly unregulated future, the next time the nursing industry faces a COVID-like event that attracts mass scrutiny, no one in Washington will be there to defend those who championed rollbacks. Trade associations will move on, regulators will point fingers, and the industry will spend another decade trying to rebuild trust it did not have to lose.
Everyone will suffer, all because of the few nursing home operators at the top who prefer to skirt the rules to save the bottom line.