Federal Health Officials Impose Only Minimal Penalties on Nursing Homes

Beth Janicek

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Congressional investigators reports that nursing homes are repeatedly cited for mistreatment of patients and the federal health officials only impose minimal penalties.

Nursing homes cycle in and out of compliance and pose a continued threat to the health and safety of patients.

"Some of these homes repeatedly harmed residents over a six-year period and yet remain in the Medicare and Medicaid programs," said the report, to be issued next week by the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress.

But in its new report, the accountability office says that little seems to have changed at the worst-performing homes. The Bush administration rarely uses its authority to deny payment to homes with a history of compliance problems and typically imposes fines far less than the maximum of $10,000 a day, the report said.

Many nursing homes are sill open even after being repeatedly cited for "poor quality care," poor nutrition services, medication errors and employing people who had been convicted of abusing patients. Another nursing home in California, had a patient that choked to death because the a suction machine was broken.

In the rare cases when federal officials try to exclude a nursing home from Medicaid and Medicare, the home often avoids the penalty by making temporary improvements and then lapsing back into noncompliance, the investigators said.

Under federal policy, the government is supposed to take immediate enforcement action against nursing homes that repeatedly cause "actual harm" to patients. But the accountability office said "immediate sanctions are often not immediate" because the Bush administration gives homes a grace period.