CMS & Nursing Home Policy Archives ⋆ Cathy Cress

Dear Governor Newsome – Don’t Sentence Frail Elders To Ca. Nursing Homes Wrenching Them from Free Loving Family Caregivers!

June 18, 2020

Dear Governor Newsome :

I am on the board of the Health Project Center in Santa Cruz, County that operates the MULTI-PURPOSE SENIOR SERVICES PROGRAM (MSSP program ). and CAREGIVER RESOURCES PROGRAM (CRC) in both Monterey and Santa Cruz Counties.

KEEP THESE NURSING HOMES CERTIFIED SENIORS IN THE CHEAPER COMMUNITY

I am writing to support these programs and implore the governor not to cut their funding. These senior programs were created to keep people out of expensive nursing homes in the 1970s and keep them in the cheaper and nurturing community. By cutting MSSP and CRC the state will only accrue more debt by spending more money to fund now COVID -19 disease-ridden nursing homes. These nursing home certified beneficiaries who are the frailest and poorest of our elderly population. They are kept in the community by MSSP where they receive food services, socialization, and therapy. Their family caregivers receive respite.

Giving these caregivers respite can be the difference between caregiver burnout due to unpaid relentless 24-hour care of a loved one. Burnout ends in placement in nursing homes. But with COVID -19 still rampaging many cannot even get in.

CAREGIVER RESOURCE CENTER KEEPS FRAIL SENIORS IN FREE FAMILY CARE VS NURSING HOME PLACEMENT $80,000 a year

Respite to caregivers to stop inappropriate placement in nursing homes is one of the main functions of the Caregiver Resources Centers in California, which needs its funding kept intact by the governor. The Center provides support to families caring for loved ones with cognitive impairments such as Alzheimer’s Disease, making referrals to caregiver counseling, support groups, local caregiver service, and giving small respite grants. Without the caregiver falling apart, which the Caregiver Resource Center stops, once again, the older nursing home certified client will just end up being forced to trying to get into a nursing home at $80,000 a year, when the family caregiver was FREE.

IF these programs are demolished by the governor and MSSP and CRC are axed out in a blood-spattered cut and these frail seniors will be dumped into California nursing homes where the state will spend needless money it does not have.

STATE WILL PAY $80,000 A YEAR PER PERSON FOR NURSING HOME PLACEMENT VS. $5000 FOR MSSP

These programs save the state money. Each of the MSSP clients is disabled enough to be eligible for nursing homes and poor enough to be eligible for MediCal. So instead of the

state paying $80,000 or $90,000 per person per year in a nursing home, the State pays only on average a little over $5,000 for the person to be in MSSP and nothing for the family caregiver. .This makes the cuts both fiscally wrong and mystifying.

MSSP CUTS MAKE RECIPIENTS GO TO NURSING HOMES WITH 0 TESTING, JUNK PPE THAT LOOKS LIKE GARBAGE BAGS WITH HOLES

Seniors have borne the greatest share of death already from COVID-19, as over 50% of the dead in the US are now elders from coronavirus who lived in a nursing home rife with the virus. These MSSP participants, without the support of MSSP, will have to turn to nursing homes. According to the House Select Committee on Nursing Homes a few days ago, these facilities do not have enough testing and personal protective equipment to stop the virus from spreading. They do not even have PPE and at CMS direction, FEMA has been sending out junk for PPE that looks like garbage bags with holes. This is what you would be sentencing these frail elders to with the scrawl of the governor’s seal.

CRC CUTS SEND Frail ELDERS FROM FREE FAMILY CARE TO $80,000 YR NURSING HOMES

You are sending these seniors from the loving care of their family to nursing homes with few beds, COVID-19 raging from one bed to the next bed, beds not 6 feet apart, and no

testing or PPE. All this while the state pays $80,000 or $90,000 per person per year in a nursing home when the State pays only on average a little over $5,000 for the person to be in MSSP.

CUTS TRAVESTY IN JUDGEMENT AND MORAL FISCAL BANKRUPT CHOICE

I am a graduate of Berkeley with a master’s in SW in aging planning and community development and this is just planning for more state debt and more seniors dying in expensive, CMS FEMA and Federally caused, death traps called nursing homes.

Sincerely

Cathy Cress MSW

Cathy Cress
cressgcm@got.net
CressGCM Consult
https://cathycress.com/

Santa Cruz, Ca 95062

Nursing Home Still Deaths Camps, 40,000 Dead – Feds Skew the Stats

June 14, 2020

Rachel Maddow once again, now the House of Representatives swept a spotlight on the despicable nursing home mortality rate of COVID -19. Nursing Home residents remain the largest % of deaths in the US. Although only 0.6 of the population they represent a whopping 42 % of the deaths

Feds Statistics Insanely Wrong

Highlighting the Do Nothing attitude that continues in the Trump federal government, CMS just released data collected from nursing home national wide that is cast as insanely wrong. Nursing home officials said their data were somehow scrambled, either because nursing home personnel reported in the wrong columns, or the numbers were loaded incorrectly somewhere between the CDC and CMS.

Yesterday the House Select Committee Briefing Confirms Urgent Need for Federal Action to Protect Nursing Homes from Coronavirus

Chaired by Rep. James E. Clyburn, they explored the devastating impact of the coronavirus pandemic on nursing home residents and workers, including the deaths of more than 40,000 Americans in nursing homes across the country.

Chairman Clyburn called on the Trump Administration to take action to protect nursing homes, stating: “[W]e need the federal government to ensure our nursing homes have enough testing and personal protective equipment to stop the virus from spreading. That means providing coordination and resources—not just leaving it up to the states.”

Dr. David Grabowski of Harvard Medical School explained, “Rather than pushing the logistics and costs of testing and PPE to states and nursing homes, the federal government needs to own this issue. The federal government should set a consistent policy across all U.S. nursing homes and then provide states and nursing homes with the resources to achieve it.” He concluded, “The buck has to stop there.”

The Trump administration failed to provide nursing homes with testing and protective equipment.

We have focused on a lack of PPE in hospitals but what about nursing homes. Asked if the federal government has done enough to stem the outbreak in nursing homes, Dr. Grabowski replied: “Absolutely not, the guidance was not sufficient. I’ve actually called it ‘non-guidance guidance’ in that there were no teeth or dollars behind it. And if you don’t put logistics, if you don’t put costs into this guidance, if it’s just simply a theoretical set of guidance for the nursing homes and for the states; it’s not actually going to happen.” He concluded, “I would have liked to have seen federal leadership.”

Dr. Grabowski stated that nursing homes in many states still “can’t get testing fast enough” and “are really struggling to find the tests.” He explained, “The federal government should’ve put the testing in place and actually paid for it.” He stated, “Until we get rapid and accurate testing for all staff and residents, we won’t be able to contain COVID.”

Mr. Carlson explained that nursing homes face serious shortages of PPE and that “shipments from FEMA have been a bit late and inadequate.” He also explained that “the lack of federal coordination” has “impeded facilities’ ability to identify infected persons and to provide care.”

PPE Feds Send Looks like Blue Plastic Trash bags

NPR reported the PPE is either never delivered, flimsy, and much less than ordered or looks like remade trash bags. Instead of proper medical gowns, many packages hold large blue plastic ponchos.

In late April I blogged about the national COVID epidemic in nursing homes. It has been a month and a half and death toll, which was 10,000 rocketed up to, 40000, now – that’s 30,000 more deaths in just a month and a half.

Workers in the facilities still have inadequate PPE to protect themselves from the virus, and CMS in some fabulist attempt to look like it actually cares about Medicare and Medicaid, comes up with an outcome study that seems to be run by drunks or charlatans.

Now Rachel Maddow is showing us nothing has changed except the bodies are piled higher and higher in nursing homes. I care and I assume every senior agency that gets this does but put that caring into action. Write your Congressman, or maybe just adopt a nursing home and raise money in the community to buy PPE for them. This is, of course, pathetic but the government does not care, CMS does not care and President Trump certainly does not care about older people.

Why is CMS Loosening Nursing Homes Infection Control in Pandemic ?

May 9, 2020

When 20% of COVID-19 cases are in Nursing Homes -CMS Rolling Back Infection Control

Insanely CMS and the FEDS are considering rolling back infection control in a nursing home in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic -when more than 20 % of the cases in the US are in Nursing Homes.

The mind-boggling idea was reported in USA Today. A rule proposed last year by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) would modify the amount of time infection prevention must devote to a facility from at least part-time to “sufficient time,” an undefined term that lets the facility decide how much time should be spent.

Why do you need infection control in a nursing home- even before COVID -19?

Over 4 million Americans are admitted to or reside in nursing homes and skilled nursing facilities each year and nearly one million persons reside in assisted living facilities. Data about infections that occur in these skilled nursing home include on a normal day before coronavirus

1 to 3 million serious infections occur every year in these facilities.
Infections include urinary tract infection, diarrheal diseases, antibiotic-resistant staph infections, and many others.
Infections are a major cause of hospitalization and death; as many as 380,000 people die of the infections in LTCFs every year.

Nursing Homes deaths May Be 50% of All Deaths in Pandemic

These infection control rationals were before COVID-19. Now, in the midst of this black plague of the 21st Century, it is thought, according to the Washington Post that nursing homes may account for 50% of death BEFORE infection control is further diluted by CMS.

Cities& States Reduce COVID-19 Risk in Nursing Homes -Feds Increase Them

In contrast to the blighted policy idea of the Federal government, Detroit, as a city, has tested every nursing home and in addition, is testing all staff and providing them with PPE.San Francisco is also now testing every resident of a nursing home. States like Maryland and Wisconsin and testing all nursing homes.

The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that at the end of the pandemic we may find out half of the deaths in the pandemic were from residents of nursing homes. In light of all of this carnage and potential destruction of the elder population in the US- why then are CMS and Trump loosening infection control? Is this throwing salt into the would of frail elders, madness, an attempt to delete people on social security, incompetence at CMS or CMS following the bedeviled destructive policy of the Trump administration? We need answers but will we as a country get them in time?

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