During a March 13 video chat with her mother, who was living in a Georgia nursing home on lockdown, Kelly Chapman noticed the worker facilitating the call wasn’t wearing a mask or gloves. After learning hours later that the nursing home had five confirmed COVID-19 cases, she arranged to remove her then 79-year-old mom, Wilma, from the facility — and, while picking up her mother the next day, observed an employee entering the building sans personal protective equipment.
“In my heart of hearts, I still believe this is the better way to go,” she said. “I just don’t know if I can handle it.” With these deficiencies laid bare, long-term care experts predict the pandemic will accelerate a years-long push to direct the United States’ fast-aging population away from institutionalization and toward home and community-based settings. At the same time, many are calling for substantial upgrades to nursing-home conditions, including by creating smaller, more self-contained settings within facilities, and providing fairer compensation and benefits for their largely underpaid workforce.
“However, the additional tragedy has been the failure of the public health system at every level to prioritize and direct resources to these residents and caregivers when we knew they were especially vulnerable and lacking resources,” the organization added. “Let’s focus on prioritizing nursing homes for resources to address COVID-19 right now, and invest on making them better for the future. That means fully funding Medicaid for the actual cost to provide care, so residents receive the best.
Medicaid provides the largest funding source for nursing homes; other sources include private pay and long-term care insurance. Contrary to popular belief, Medicare doesn’t pay for long-term care; it will cover skilled nursing facility stays of up to 100 days, typically for rehabilitative purposes after a hospital discharge. But “Medicare, as a rule, pays better than Medicaid,” Super said, so this relatively small fraction of short-stay patients proves far more profitable for nursing homes.
Smaller, more community-based settings for elder care — even if they’re just existing nursing homes divvied up into smaller “pods” — can help prevent infections from ripping through large congregate populations, and perhaps prevent an entire facility from needing to go into lockdown during an infectious-disease outbreak, said Carol Bradley Bursack, the founder of Minding Our Elders, a caregiver-support resource. “We’re stuck on this model of these huge, huge nursing homes,” she said.
Somehow missing from your 'analysis' were states such as NY and PA which ORDERED COVID patients to be admitted to nursing homes. Egregious: NY - Fed Govt created 1000s of extra beds. PA - Health Dir Levine removed his mother from nursing home but never told public of risks.
A thinly veiled add for Biden campaign and support for expanding Medicare program. We are in this situation because of Gov overreach, and not the lack of it. Whatever they touch becomes costly, unaffordable and adds to our public debt.
Sadly, the nursing homes don't want families to be involved because then we would see the poor quality of employees they hire & the poor care they give. Facilities need to share info on why employees are fired so bad ones don't keep getting hired at other facilities.