Nursing homes are now on Biden’s agenda. It seems that he, well the puppeteers behind the curtain, have a new agenda. Let’s go after the nursing homes and ‘fix them good.’

The White House on Monday announced plans to boost nursing home staffing and oversight, blaming some of the 200,000-plus covid deaths of nursing home residents and staff during the pandemic on inadequate conditions.

Officials said the plan would set minimum staffing levels, reduce the use of shared rooms and crack down on the poorest-performing nursing homes to reduce the risk of residents contracting infectious diseases. The White House also said it planned to scrutinize the role of private equity firms, citing data that their ownership was linked with worse outcomes and higher costs.

Read the above again. The deaths of wonderful parents, grandparents, and relatives in those nursing homes are being blamed SOLEY upon the staff??!! 

We are supposed to applaud the fact that the Biden Administration will shell out more money for nursing home oversight? Because you know, the current nursing home standards just don’t do the trick.

Experts say staffing levels are the single most important marker for nursing home quality, and many facilities lack sufficient numbers of nurses, nursing assistants and other workers involved in providing direct care to patients. The coronavirus pandemic has led to many workers leaving the industry, even as nursing homes raised wages, so a new federal staffing requirement may take time to put into place.

Don’t get me wrong. Sadly there are nursing homes across the country that really don’t meet the standards of care. And yes, that’s criminal as it is incredibly detrimental to the patients. However, the Biden Administration makes it clear that anything that has happened in the nursing homes in the last couple of years is 100% the responsibility of the nursing home staff. Not anyone else. 

Without decisive action now, these unacceptable conditions may get worse. Private equity firms have been buying up struggling nursing homes, and research shows that private equity-owned nursing homes tend to have significantly worse outcomes for residents. Private equity firms’ investment in nursing homes has ballooned from $5 billion in 2000 to more than $100 billion in 2018, with about 5% of all nursing homes now owned by private equity firms. Too often, the private equity model has put profits before people—a particularly dangerous model when it comes to the health and safety of vulnerable seniors and people with disabilities. Recent research has found that resident outcomes are significantly worse at private equity-owned nursing homes:

Ohhhh, I get it now. This is a next phase of Obamacare. Private companies don’t know how to run nursing homes. So this is a plan to let the government step in and run them. Because the government is SO good at running a business aren’t they? 

How to fix this? Build tracking databases. Offer transparency, go after private equity firms that own nursing homes, use equity as a hiring lens and… UNIONIZE!! 

I can just picture it now. The entire nursing home staff goes union. When things don’t go their way during the next negotiation period, will they walk out and leave their patients stranded? Has the Biden Administration thought of that issue? NO, they have not. 

Furthermore, by putting equity in as part of the hiring equation, want to bet a very qualified caregiver might NOT get hired because that person didn’t check the correct equity box?

Nursing homes have had one hell of a time these last two years. When the doors slammed shut back in March 2020, they along with everyone else was scrambling to stock up on PPE, figure out how to care for their patients, and more. 

What DIDN’T help matters is Governors mandating that the elderly in hospitals who were ill with Covid be sent to any nursing home who had available beds. Yes, Andrew Cuomo, you are the chief culprit in this. You just know that Janice Dean will be watching this development very closely. 

He should vow to investigate why several governors pushed thousands of covid positive patients into long term care facilities at the beginning of the pandemic.

Biden to vow nursing home crackdown as part of State of the Union – The Washington Post https://t.co/GSfBBluqcL

— Janice Dean (@JaniceDean) February 28, 2022

Sadly, the Biden Administration won’t investigate as MOST of those nursing home deaths are in Democrat run states. Not only that, but far too many of our seniors in nursing and assisted living homes died scared and alone because Covid isolation mandates kept their families from them. 

Never mind that, tonight during the SOTU, Biden will roll out this new idea. 

#Nursinghomes, once again, become the punching bag for an administration in turmoil.

The initiatives @POTUS will unveil tomorrow will do nothing but inflict punishment on those providers and #healthcareheroes who have been on the front lines of the #COVID19 pandemic. https://t.co/5QF70990Gv

— Zach Shamberg (@zashamberg) March 1, 2022

Exit question:

Will @JoeBiden appoint @andrewcuomo the nursing home Czar? https://t.co/SUs6tIncM8

— Tony G GETTR: @IN01902 @mbta is a dumpster fire. (@IN01970) March 1, 2022

That’s an idea so bad that Biden would run with it. 

Feature Photo Credit: Elderly hands with cane via Alex_Fotos at Pixabay, cropped and modified