Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation Hearing re: In the Hands of Strangers: Are Nursing Home Safeguards Working?
WASHINGTON, DC,
May 15 -
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I do appreciate you holding this hearing. The Chairman of the full committee is looking forward to hearing the testimony of administrator Kerry Weems and his ideas as well; unfortunately we will have to wait until the end of this hearing to hear that testimony. Once again we are in the awkward position of trying to hold up the head of a large federal agency for the better part of a day. We know they have other important things on their plate and I want you to know that this is an issue that bothers me and I do wish the committee would approach this with a little more sensitivity.
Representative Blackburn talked about long term care insurance and I know that this is not the purpose of this hearing today but I do also want to mention a little about long term care insurance. I was with the Alzheimer’s Association fundraiser last night and banquet that they have and it really is apparent to me that we are not as a body talking about long term care insurance and the availability of long term care insurance nearly enough for the American people that it even pops up on their radar screen.
When I turned 50 years old, which was unfortunately some time ago, one of the last pieces of advice my mother gave to me was to consider buying long term care insurance because she told me if you don’t buy it when you are fifty you are won’t be able to afford it when you are seventy-five or eighty. And truly that was good advice and I do want us to use our opportunities with the ability to inform the American people that the availability and cost of long term care insurance at mid-life is an affordable option that people ought to consider.
Yes, the Medicaid program will pick up the cost of your nursing home expense, but at least in my home state of Texas, they are only obligated to place you within 500 miles of your home. That means for someone living in Lewisville, Texas, as I do, they might be placed in a nursing home in Paris, Texas. If you think it’s hard to get your grandkids to visit you when you only live a few miles away, try living 500 miles away. So it is something that is important and I do want this committee to focus on it.
There are so many issues involved with the topic at hand today. I am glad to see we’re focusing on this issue. I do hope that the panel before us today will focus specifically on some issues related to transparency and the type of transparency that is needed in the industry. Perhaps the best information we can give consumers is information about not just cost of the stay in a nursing home, as well as things like infection rates, things like the availability of occupational physical therapy. The problem is I’m afraid this hearing is going to get bogged down in trying to figure out who owns what and who’s done what to whom.
I’ve always been a strong advocate of transparency in the medical and nursing community and recently introduced a bill about greater transparency in Health Information Technology and the health industry, HR 5885. For anyone keeping score at home it would allow hospitals and physician offices to integrate information technology in a much more seamless manner than they’re able to do currently. This issue seems on point for this hearing today because it appears that a major problem of monitoring and enforcement and regulation of nursing homes is the lack of integrated information being supplied to people like Administrator Weems of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
I still wonder if the larger problem lies not with a general lack of transparency but with a lack of consistent and uniform enforcement. So often we are seeing good nursing homes found deficient and given fines because of a regulator who was sent to their facility, perhaps in a somewhat over-zealous manner. Meanwhile nursing homes that have a poor indicator of quality are given a seal of approval because the regulator sent to check up on them employed a much more laid back approach. I am interested in learning about the effectiveness of the Quality Indicator Survey pilot program and how it can effectively work on a nationwide scale.
Finally, I can’t help but notice the recent New York Times article that focused on this topic and noted the frustration of our friends on the trial bar who were having a hard time figuring out who to sue. While I feel their pain, one of the problems that we’re facing today is we’re critical of large chains that acquired larger and larger ownership share of nursing homes, but we’ve sued and regulated and under-funded the smaller owner of the nursing home just completely out of existence in the past ten years. And while some of that fault perhaps lies at the state level, a good deal of that blame lies here on the doorstep of the United States House of Representatives.
So I do hope we will, rather than just simply focusing on whom to blame in this discussion today, we might be able to focus on a few solutions. Because after all, that is what the American people sent us here for.
