Tag Archives for Senator Chuck Grassley

Tackling surge of COVID-19 in Nursing Homes

Published ion RINewToday on December 15, 2020

Over the months, while public health officials watch the uptick in new COVID-19 cases, Congress releases two reports, one taking a snapshot of nursing home performance and resident deaths throughout the first eight months of the pandemic, and the other one sounding the alarm about the impact of COVID-19 on the nation’s nursing homes and warning it is now getting worse.  

About three months ago, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) announced the release of a 67-page report on care provided in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities throughout the nation during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The comprehensive report, titled “COVID-19 and Nursing Homes: What Went Wrong and Next Steps,” reviewed U.S. nursing home performance during the early fall and summer months of the pandemic. According to the report, more than two out of five deaths due to COVID-19 in the United States are linked to nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.

Stopping the Spread of COVID-19 in Nursing Homes

“Partisan finger pointing, rather than meaningful analysis, cannot serve as a useful guide for policymakers in crafting the necessary bipartisan reforms in response to the unprecedented challenges facing this entire sector and its employees working on the frontlines during this pandemic,” says the Senate Finance committee report, released on Sept. 23. It stressed that suggestions that coronavirus-related deaths in nursing facilities “are attributable solely, or even primarily, to acts or omissions by the current administration falls well short of addressing the multi-faceted problems in this sector.”

The report added, “Such a one-dimensional approach necessarily overlooks several factors that fueled the outbreak of COVID-19 in nursing homes across the United States, and around the world. Minimizing, or devoting scant attention to such factors, makes it enormously difficult for members of Congress to come together in support of long-overdue reforms and bipartisan solutions to the complex problems facing nursing homes today.” 


The report, produced by the majority staff of the Senate Finance Committee, examined what steps might have prevented these fatalities by minimizing the spread of COVID-19 in the facilities and discussed what actions could be taken now to slow the surge of deaths in nursing homes during this and future pandemics.  

While new coronavirus cases have surged to nursing homes throughout the nation and despite federal and state efforts to stall the spreading of the virus, the Senate Finance Committee report noted that facilities have already received significant relief assistance from Congress and the Trump administration totaling approximately $21 billion in addition to technical assistance, guidance and training.

The report’s findings noted that for years preceding the COVID-19 outbreak in March, private nursing homes have had widespread deficiencies in infection control and prevention.  The majority staff also found that state governments and health officials in some of the hard-hit states fell short of their responsibility to ensure quality care, and in multiple states, staffing and supply shortages persisted for years prior to the pandemic. 

Nursing homes around the world have struggled with many of the same issues as the United States during the pandemic, including Europe, the United Kingdom and Canada, noted the report.

State governments in some cases also failed to enforce federal guidelines for these care facilities as required through their participation in Medicare and Medicaid, particularly guidance provided to minimize coronavirus transmission in their facilities, noted the report. In addition, the majority staff found that nursing home staff who work in multiple facilities unknowingly played a key role in spread of COVID-19 in nursing homes. 


Finally, the Senate Finance Committee report also noted that several governors pressured nursing facilities to accept COVID-19 patients when personal protective equipment (PPE) was still in short supply and some did so even after the federal government made temporary hospitals available in their jurisdictions. 
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The Senate Finance Committee report provided, to members of the Senate Finance Committee with detailed background information on the many challenges that nursing homes continue to face during this year’s public health crisis. It provides Congressional lawmakers with specific recommendations, based on best practices that some facilities and public officials adopted during the ongoing pandemic to protect their residents and staff.  It also includes additional suggestions to better protect the nation’s older Americans from elder abuse, neglect and exploitation.

 
Updating the Grim Toll of COVID-19 Deaths in Nursing Homes 

Last week, U.S. Senators Bob Casey (D-PA), Ranking Member of the Special Committee on Aging, and Ron Wyden (D-OR), Ranking Member of the Finance Committee, released their report that warned that the already dire situation in nursing homes is worsening.

“It’s with great sadness that we are once again giving a grim update on the toll that COVID-19 is continuing to take on nursing homes. It’s abundantly clear that inaction has contributed to the loss of more than 104,000 mothers, fathers, grandparents, friends and neighbors who lived and worked in nursing homes and long-term care facilities across the country,” said Senators Casey and Wyden, in a statement announcing the report released on Dec. 10. “Experts are predicting that we are heading into the most severe months of the COVID-19 pandemic, marred by climbing caseloads and increasing stress on our Nation’s health care system,” they say, calling on the Senate colleagues to hammer out and pass a comprehensive COVID-19 relief bill. 

According to the eight-page report, entitled, “The Cost of Inaction: 19 Deaths an Hour and Rising,” last month, more than 15 nursing home residents died from COVID-19 per hour, with 19 residents dying each hour during the week of November 22, 2020, the most recent week reported.

The Senate Aging Committee report noted that the number of weekly COVID-19 deaths among nursing home residents has increased 133 percent since Labor Day, and 96 percent among nursing home workers during the same period. Workforce shortages have also increased since Labor Day: In November, one in six nursing homes nationwide reported that they do not have a sufficient workforce, says the report.

The Democratic Senators warned that COVID-19 cases will surge in nursing homes if Congress does not come together to hammer out bipartisan legislation to stop the spread of the pandemic.

These new report findings serve as a warning as to what will come if Congress does not come together to alleviate the COVID-19 crisis in nursing homes, says Casey and Wyden. It calls for a national strategy to save lives in nursing homes, including providing facilities with a sufficient supply of PPE, ample access to testing, resources for vaccine distribution, funding for strike teams and adequate workforce supports, and accountability measures to uphold resident rights and permit safe visits with family.

Finally, in the Ocean State…

Just days ago,the latest update of the AARP Nursing Home COVID-19 Dashboard, released by AARP’s Public Policy Institute, unveiled a new report in a series on improving the care of care provided in the nation’s nursing homes. “Rhode Island’s nursing homes continue to face alarming trends,” says the AARP report.

Using data released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services—which is self-reported by nursing homes—the AARP Public Policy Institute, in collaboration with the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University in Ohio, created the AARP Nursing Home COVID-19 Dashboard to provide four-week snapshots of the virus’ infiltration into nursing homes and impact on nursing home residents and staff. The dashboard will continue to be updated every four weeks.

In the four weeks analyzed, from October 19 to November 15, AARP’s dashboard reports that Rhode Island nursing homes had a dramatic increase in resident and staff cases, and a higher percentage of facilities reporting they are without a 1-week supply of PPE.

“With coronavirus surging across the country, nursing home residents and staff remain in grave danger as the virus reenters nursing homes and other facilities at an alarming pace,” said AARP State Director Kathleen Connell.  “Facilities continue to have shortages of the staff and PPE needed to keep residents and workers safe and stop the spread. Our state leaders must act now to save lives,” she said.

Connell added, “AARP will continue fighting to protect nursing home residents now and offering solutions to improve our long-term care system for the decades to come.”

For copies of Senate reports go to: https://www.aging.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/The%20Cost%20of%20Inaction.%2019%20Deaths%20and%20Hour%20and%20Rising.pdf; 

https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/SFCNursingHomesCOVIDMajorityStaffSFCReport23Sep2020FINAL.pdf.

The complete dashboard is available at aarp.org/nursinghomedashboard.

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Nursing Home Care in the Spotlight

Published in the Woonsocket Call on August 4, 2019

Following on the heels of its March 6 hearing, “Not Forgotten: Protecting Americans from Abuse and Neglect in Nursing Homes,” the Senate Finance Committee held its second nursing home hearing this year, “Promoting Elder Justice: A Call for Reform,” on July 23, in 215 Dirksen, to study proposed reforms to reduce neglect and abuse in the nation’s nursing homes and to put a spotlight on the need to reauthorize key provisions of the Elder Justice Act.

During the two hour and twenty-minute morning hearing, Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) along 11 members of the Senate committee listened to the testimony of five panel witnesses.

In his opening statement, Grassley acknowledged that the work isn’t done yet to improving the care in the nation’s nursing homes and Congress must protect nursing home and assisted living residents and those in group living arrangements from harm. The Iowa Senator noted in the recently released U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report the federal agency that provides auditing, evaluation, and investigative services for Congress, noted that while one-third of nursing home residents may experience harm while under the care of these facilities, in more than half of these cases, the harm was preventable.

Calls for Bipartisan Efforts to Improve Nursing Home Care

Grassley called on Congress to reauthorize programs, such as the Elder Justice Act, to put the brakes on the growing trend of elder an abuse fueled by social media.

Adds, Wyden, in his opening statement, there is now an opportunity for Congress to come together to hammer out bipartisan legislative reforms to fix the nation’s nursing home oversight efforts. He urged his fellow Senate committee members to work to reduce the instances of physical, sexual, mental and emotion abuse in nursing homes, that appears to be increasing. He also called for a redo to the federal nursing home rating system because it does not reflect the increased prevalence of abuse.

During the first panel, Megan H. Tucker, Senior Advisor for Legal Review, of the HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG), stated that abuse and neglect oftentimes are not properly identified, reported or even addressed. While most providers are delivering good care, Tucker warned that Health and Human Service safeguards are lacking.

Tucker testified that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) should use data more effectively and close the gaps in their reporting process to ensure that abuse and neglect are identified and the deficiencies corrected.

Concluding the first panel, John E. Dicken, Director, Health Care, of the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO), discussed a newly released GAO report, released at the hearing, that detailed a growing trend of abuse and neglect of residents. According to one GAO report findings, abuse deficiencies more than doubled between 2013 (430) and 2017 (875), with the greatest increase in actual harm and immediate jeopardy deficiencies, and that abuse is still under-reported, he said. The GAO report also expressed concern over “significant gaps” with CMS’s oversight.

Leading the second panel, Robert Blancato, Coordinator of the Elder Justice Coalition, called on Congress to reauthorize, the Elder Justice Act. With elder abuse becoming a “national emergency,” he urged lawmakers to dedicate funding for Adult Protective Services at the local and state levels. Blancato also stressed the importance of strengthening the long-term care ombudsman program, continuing the Elder Justice Coordinating Council, authorizing an Advisory Board on Elder Abuse, Neglect, and Exploitation, and finally funding for elder abuse forensic centers.

President and CEO, Mark Parkinson, of the Washington, DC-based American Health Care Association (AHCA), representing nearly 10,000 of the 15,000 plus nursing homes in the country who provide care to nearly four million individuals each year, stated he was not at the hearing to defend poor care but to provide solutions to Congress to prevent such incidents from happening again.

Fixing the Problem

Parkinson testified that over the past seven years, facilities participating in AHCA’s quality initiative, have shown improvement in 18 of 24 quality measures. Specifically, there are less hospital readmissions, fewer antipsychotic medications being prescribed, staff are spending more time than ever before with residents and today’s nursing homes are more person-centered care today than ever before.

Parkinson called on lawmakers to improve employee background check systems, add patient satisfaction data to CMS’s nursing home rating system, address the severe staffing shortage and to adequate fund Medicaid.

Finally, Lori Smetanka, Executive Director of the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, ended the second panel discussions, by warning that more must be done to protect nursing home residents from abuse.

Smetanka urged Congress to take steps to enforce minimum requirements for sufficient staffing, establish standards and oversight for nursing home ownership and operations, prevent rollback of nursing home regulatory standards, increase the transparency of information and to strengthen and adequately fund elder justice provisions.

Now, with the Congress putting poor nursing home care on its policy radar screen, both Democratic and Republic congressional leadership must work closely together to come up with bipartisan solutions. Fix this problem once and for all.

Senate Finance Committee members — Senators Lankford, Stabenow, Daines, Menendez, Carper, Cardin, Warner, Casey, Brown, Cortez Masto, and Hassan – attended the July 23 hearing

To listen to this Senate Finance Committee hearing, go to http://www.c-span.org/video/?462733-1/finance.

For a copy of the GAO report, http://www.gao.gov/assets/710/700418.pdf.

Attacking Rising Prescription Drug Costs

Published in the Woonsocket Call on April 7, 2019

The Washington, DC-based AARP timed the release of its latest Rx Price Watch report as the House Energy Commerce Committee marked up and passed a dozen bills just days ago, six that would lower prescription drug costs. The legislative proposals now go to the House floor for consideration.

AARP’s new report, a continuation of a series that has been tracking price changes for widely used prescription drugs since 2004, was circulated to House Committee members before their markup and vote and its findings sent a message to the lawmakers that they hear from their older constituents, that is the costs of pharmaceutical drugs is skyrocketing, making it difficult to fill needed prescriptions.

Poll after poll findings reflect the concerns of seniors about their ability to pay for prescribed medications. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll released last month, 79 percent of survey respondents view drug prices to be “unreasonable,” while just 17 percent found the costs to be “reasonable.” Twenty-four percent of these respondents found it difficult to pay the costs of their prescription drugs.

Generic Drugs Can Save Dollars

According to the new AARP Public Policy Institute (PPI) report, by Leigh Purvis and Dr. Stephen W. Schondelmeyer, the average annual cost of therapy for one widely used brand-name prescription drug in 2017 was over 18 times higher than the cost of therapy for one generic drug. The cost for a generic medication used on a chronic basis averaged $365 per year. In contrast, the average annual cost for a brand-name prescription drug was $6,798. But, four years earlier the price differential between these same market baskets was substantially smaller ($4,308 verses $751 respectively).

“Generics account for nearly nine out of every 10 prescriptions filled in the U.S. but represent less than a quarter of the country’s drug spending,” said Debra Whitman, Executive Vice President and Chief Public Policy Officer at AARP, in a statement released with the PPI’s 28 page report “These results highlight the importance of eliminating anticompetitive behavior by brand-name drug companies so that we get more lower-priced generic drugs on the market,” says Whitman.

AARP’s PPI report, entitled “Trends in Retail Prices of Generic Prescription Drugs Widely Used by Older Americans,” found that retail prices for 390 generic prescription drugs commonly used by older adults, including Medicare beneficiaries, decreased by an average of 9.3 percent in 2017, compared to the general inflation rate of 2.1 percent. The decline follows two consecutive years of substantial generic drug price decreases; the previous two consecutive years saw increases in generic drug prices. All but three of the 390 generic prescription drugs analyzed in AARP’s report had a retail price change in 2017. While prices for 297 (76 percent) drug products decreased, 90 (23 percent) products had price increases.
Six commonly used generic drug products had retail price increases of greater than 70 percent, including a nearly 200 percent increase for sertraline HCL, an antidepressant, finds the AARP.

AARP’s PPI report found that with older adults taking an average of 4.5 prescription drugs every month, those using generic prescription drugs were likely to have an average annual retail cost of $1,642 in 2017.

“The gap between average annual brand-name and generic drug prices has increased dramatically—brand name drug prices were six times higher than generic drug prices in 2013 but more than 18 times higher in 2017,” said Leigh Purvis, Director of Health Services Research, AARP Policy Institute, and co-author of the report. “As long as brand name drug prices continue to skyrocket, the value of prohibiting brand name drug company practices that slow or prevent competition from generic and biosimilar drugs cannot be overstated.”

AARP Pushes for Passage of Bills to Lower Drug Costs

Before the Committee on Energy and Commerce vote on April 3, in correspondence AARP urged Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) and Ranking Member Greg Walden (R-Ore) to enact two bills (along with four other proposals) being considered at the morning markup session. These legislative proposals would lower prescription drug costs and had previously been approved by the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee.

In the correspondence, AARP’s Nancy A. LeaMond, Executive Vice President and Chief Advocacy and Engagement Officer, pushed for passage of H.R., 1499. the “Protecting Consumer Access to Generic Drugs Act of 2019.” introduced by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL). This proposal would make it illegal for brand-name and generic drug manufacturers to enter into agreements in which the brand-name drug manufacturer pays the generic manufacturer to keep a generic equivalent off the market. The bill was passed by voice vote.

LeaMond also supported H.R., 965, the “Creating and Restoring Equal Access to Equivalent Samples (CREATES) Act of 2019,” introduced by Reps. David Cicilline (D-RI), Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Doug Collins (R-GA), Peter Welch (D-VT), and David McKinley (R-WV). The proposal would establish a process by which generic manufacturers could obtain sufficient quantities of brand drug samples for testing thereby deterring gaming of safety protocols that brand manufacturers use to delay or impede generic entry. The bill passed by a bipartisan vote of 51-0.

At the markup, Pallone and Walden were able to work out philosophical differences on H.R. 1499 and H.R. 965. The two lawmakers also hammered out a compromise on H.R. 1503, the “Organize Book Transparency Act of 2019,” that would ensure that the Orange book, which identifies drug products approved on the basis of safety and effectiveness by the Food and Drug Administration, is accurate and up-to-date.

Washington Insiders say that Democratic control of the House will ensure the passage of these legislative proposals on the House floor and the bipartisan vote on the CREATES Act in the lower chamber creates an opportunity for Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to successfully push his CREATES Act companion measure in the Senate.

Grassley says the broad, bipartisan action by the House Energy and Commerce Committee to advance the CREATES Act is a major win for consumers. “I look forward to advancing this bill because it will cut down on abuses in the system that keep prices high for patients. I’m also pleased that the committee advanced a bill to address pay-for-delay schemes. Although that bill is not identical to the bill I’ve sponsored in the Senate, the bill’s movement shows that the committee is serious about addressing the pay-for-delay problem,” says the Senator.

As They See It…

AARP’s LeaMond, says “Brand-name drug companies want to stifle generic competition to protect their monopolies and profits. AARP believes that eliminating these deliberate anticompetitive behaviors will result in a more robust generic drug market and greater savings for both patients and taxpayers. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that legislation such as the CREATES Act could save taxpayers more than $3 billion over a decade, and the Federal Trade Commission estimated pay-for-delay deals cost consumers and taxpayers $3.5 billion a year.

“We have long supported the CREATES Act and banning pay-for-delay agreements, and are heartened that Congress is acting to improve access to generic drugs. These bills will promote competition driving down costs for seniors,” says Lisa Swirsky, Senior Policy Analyst, at the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

“Congressman Cicilline has been a leader in our caucus for putting prescription drug prices at the front of our agenda. Moving generics to market faster is an important step to lower prescription drug costs for every American,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “House Democrats have made it a top priority to lower Americans’ health costs by reducing the price of prescription drugs, and these bipartisan bills show we mean to deliver,” she says.