Board of Advisors Professor of Law Nina Kohn recently spoke with the Garden City Telegram on the lack of nursing home oversight throughout the country.
High death rates among nursing home residents and poor infection control during the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the deadly ramifications of a chronically understaffed industry. But Nina Kohn, a law professor at Syracuse University, said that in the years since, most states have failed to enforce regulations that would prevent similar crises from happening in the future.
“The fact that we’re continuing to see inadequate oversight even after we learned, amid the pandemic, how dangerous that could be suggests that nursing home residents really aren’t a priority for our public officials,” she said.
And because around three-fourths of nursing home residents pay for their care primarily through Medicaid and Medicare, a lax regulatory environment can also enable fraud and misuse of tax dollars.
“The state is paying for incredibly vulnerable people to be in institutions, and we don’t have the most basic oversight of whether those institutions are caring for people in a way that is safe,” Kohn said. “We also don’t have the oversight needed to ensure that taxpayer money is being used to provide the care the taxpayers are paying for.”
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