Tom Dinki/WBFO file photo
New York nursing homes will be required to put nearly three quarters of their money toward caring for residents, as a nursing home profit cap was included in the 2021 New York State budget.
The profit cap, also called a medical loss ratio, was tucked away in the Health and Mental Hygiene budget bill. The state Senate and Assembly passed the $212 billion budget Wednesday.
The cap will mandate nursing homes put at least 70% of their revenue toward direct care. Of that 70%, at least 40% will have to go toward paying nurses.
The push to curb nursing home profits came as a result of 15,000 New York nursing home residents dying of COVID-19 during the pandemic. Advocates and lawmakers say the deaths were a byproduct of longstanding issues in the long-term care industry, such as understaffing and owners valuing profits over care.
Vivian Zayas, whose mother died in a New York nursing home, provides insight into Gov. Cuomo’s mounting scandals on ‘Fox and Friends.’
EXCLUSIVE: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration was tracking the location of nursing home residents who died of COVID-19 since at least April 2020, despite officials’ claims that those numbers could not be verified for a report issued months later.
The revelation comes in a new Department of Health document obtained exclusively by Fox News. According to the document, nursing homes were required to submit the number of residents who died from COVID-19 at least once daily.
Legislation’s progress so far
It was during a mid-February press briefing that Gov. Andrew Cuomo first publicly voiced support of New York state deciding how much nursing homes can profit.
“If you’re a for-profit nursing home, I believe it should be mandated how much you put back into the facility and how much profit you can make,” he said.
Cuomo later included the proposed profit cap, also called a medical loss ratio, as an amendment to his 2021 budget proposal. It would mandate nursing homes put at least 70% of their revenue toward caring for residents.
Both the state Senate and Assembly have since passed their own separate versions of the profit cap over the last five weeks. The two sides will need to come to an agreement if the legislation will become law, but both their bills would also mandate at least 70% of revenue go toward care.
WBFO s Tom Dinki reports about COVID-19 s impact on nursing homes.
About a third of all U.S. COVID-19 deaths have been linked to nursing homes. In Erie County, nursing home residents make up more than half of all COVID deaths.
The New York State Attorney General, in a report released in January, found many nursing homes across the state failed to provide adequate personal protective equipment and follow infection protocols, especially during the early months of the pandemic.
Plus, visitor restrictions have left families unable to see loved ones in nursing homes for most, if not all, of the last year.
Tracing the nursing home COVID tragedy to its source(s): A Q&A with watchdog Richard Mollot
Updated Mar 16, 2021;
The failure of nursing homes to keep our seniors safe during the COVID outbreak will always be New Jersey’s greatest pandemic disgrace, a perfect storm of inadequate staffing, poor infection control, equipment shortages, inept management, and oversight lapses that contributed to the loss of 8,000 lives.
But it also clarified our obligation to transform how long-term care facilities are governed and operated, treating them not like human warehouses but as an integral part of a compassionate health care system.
To get there, we checked in with Richard Mollot, the executive director for the Long Term Care Community Coalition, a non-profit group that advocates for nursing home residents. Mollot, a Montclair resident, spoke with Dave D’Alessandro of the Star-Ledger Editorial Board, in a conversation abridged for clarity: