What to tell your Officials about Pennsylvania Nursing Homes
Your support and voice is needed! Join with ALSM and others
from across the state to tell our legislators that our seniors and their care matter.
If you are seeing this post, you heard our request for you to send a letter,
email, or make a phone call to your elected PA House and Senate officials. Here
are some points for your communication:
- Introduce yourself, where you live and work, and why this is important to you
- Nursing facilities are home to over 80,000 Pennsylvania residents
- More than two out of three people residing in a nursing facility have their care paid for by the Medicaid program.
- Analysis of publicly available cost reports by RKL, a regional accounting firm, illustrated the commonwealth’s Medicaid rate for nursing facilities are not meeting the cost to provide those services.
- Non-profit nursing homes across the commonwealth average a loss of more than $82 per patient per day, with the total Medicaid shortfall of 2017 totaling over $631 million.
- Discuss the total economic loss in your county as of March 2019 according to Leading Age PA. Here are the economic losses in counties that we have our three nursing homes:
- Blair County – $9,987, 447
- Cambria County – $3,549,083
- Centre County – $178,170
- Click this link if your county is not listed.
- Challenges that face the nursing home industry include, but are not limited to:
- Staff recruitment
- Training and retention
- Increasing costs of private pay for care
- Increasing reliance on benevolent care
- “I am asking that the general assembly includes a 2.8% rate increase for nursing facility rates in the Medical Assistance program in addition to funding the non-public medical assistance day one incentive payment at $17 million.”
Contact your representatives today! Here are links to a list of the members of the PA House and members of the PA Senate listed by district number. Not sure who your representatives are, but you mean business? Click Find Your Legislator.
To learn more about the challenges Pennsylvania nursing homes are facing, check out this press release by Leading Age PA or this opinion piece about challenges for non-profit nursing homes on PennLive.com.
