The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did not come to play this week when they filed 75,000 pages of records in response to a lawsuit brought against the nursing home staffing mandate.
This was the opening move by CMS since the American Health Care Association (AHCA) filed suit against the mandate earlier this year. According to McKnight’s, the documents filed include the 46,000-plus public comments made on the rule, but the full documents were not immediately made public due to the size of the file.
This week in Congress, lawmakers took on ballooning executive pay for nursing home leaders and slipping standards of care.
A group of senators including Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) sent a letter to the CEOs of Brookdale Senior Living, National HealthCare and the Ensign Group critical of their operations. The Hill reports that over the past five years, the companies collectively paid their executives and directors more than $250 million. From the letter:
New revelations that your companies collectively increased their executive pay by nearly 25 percent just last year, combined with the record-high profits your companies touted in the first two quarters of 2024, reveal once again that you have plenty of money available to provide high-quality care – but instead are using it to enrich yourselves and other executives.
Skilled Nursing News reports that a similar suit against the mandate brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was folded into the AHCA lawsuit. Texas originally brought claims alleging CMS violated the Administrative Procedure Act by exceeding its statutory jurisdiction with the nursing home staffing mandate.
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