Senior Care Regulation to Continue

The White House said Friday it has rejected plans being contemplated at the Department of Health and Human Services to soften government regulation of certain nursing homes.

The idea was to lessen the frequency of inspections of nursing homes that have consistently followed the law while increasing inspections at homes with a history of problems. Inspecting all homes once a year, no matter what their quality, was “nutty,” a top HHS official said earlier this year.

On Friday, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said the idea had been considered and rejected “out of hand.”

Fleischer said President Bush plans to outline a nursing home initiative this fall. “We’re going to beef up and strengthen nursing home protections,” Fleischer said. “We’re working to strengthen accountability.”

The proposal to change the frequency of nursing home inspections was first reported Friday by the New York Times. An HHS spokesman, Bill Pierce, confirmed the essence of the plan late Thursday night.

But Friday morning, administration officials at the White House and HHS said nothing like that was being considered. Pierce said he had based his comments on outdated information and has been told that the plan was rejected.

It’s unclear how far the idea got within the Bush administration.

Fleischer said the idea was presented and rejected at a White House meeting with HHS officials more than two weeks ago. But Tom Scully, the top HHS official at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said it was never a serious proposal.

Scully, who called mandatory annual inspections “nutty,” said the heart of the “nursing home quality initiative” involves collecting better data on the quality of care at each home to help consumers make smart choices when they are shopping for a home.

Once those data are available and reliable, Scully said, they could be used to set inspection priorities.