Last spring, disgraced New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law a simple but sweeping reform that would have required nursing homes to spend a majority of their revenue on patient care. Specifically, the law required nursing home operators to spend 70 percent of their (near-exclusively government-supplied) revenues on qualified patient care–related expenses, more than half of which needed to be patient-facing staffers like nurses, nursing assistants, and nutritionists. Additionally, the law permits state health authorities to claw back any profits in excess of a 5 percent margin to finance a state fund for adding staff at financially struggling facilities—a seemingly modest requirement, given that the nursing home lobby claims the average skilled nursing facility barely breaks even.
In practice, this law, broadly dubbed the “safe staffing law,” was bound to run afoul of New York’s incomprehensibly powerful nursing home mafia. In theory, however, it was a refreshingly bullshit-free blueprint for fixing one of the most pointlessly horrifying features of 21st-century American health care: Virtually every institution in the business of caring for the sick is chronically, deliberately, and murderously understaffed, a state of affairs that has arguably killed more Americans than the virus itself since the pandemic began.
prospect.org/health/nursing-home-slumlord-manifesto/