State budget includes bump for struggling nursing homes
Caring for the county’s vulnerable elderly population became a little easier for nursing homes and assisted living facilities on July 8 when Gov. Tom Wolf signed the 2023 state budget.
The budget includes a 17.5% increase for Medicaid nursing home care, and $131 million in onetime American Rescue Plan Act funding for COVID-19 relief to help nursing homes with funding until the Medicaid funding goes into effect in January.
The American Rescue Plan funding also provides support for assisted living and personal-care residents.
“It’s definitely going to help our budget, particularly in our skilled nursing facilities,” said Jeff Carraway, chief financial officer at Lutheran SeniorLife.
Lutheran SeniorLife owns the St. John Community in Mars, the Passavant Community in Zelienople and other senior living facilities and care centers in the county and region.
Carraway said due to industry-wide staffing shortages, costs for using temporary-employee agencies have increased.
“This will help maintain our staffing levels,” he said.
The budget increases also will help with ongoing pandemic-related costs, such as the purchase of personal protection equipment such as masks and testing apparatus for staff and residents.
“Those costs really haven’t gone away,” Carraway said.
He does not yet know what Lutheran SeniorLife’s state allocation will be, so it remains unknown whether the budget bump will cover costs.
“We appreciate the recognition that the cost of care has gone up substantially over the last couple years,” Carraway said of the budget increases. “We are pleased that there’s acknowledgment.”
Brian Hortert, chief operating officer at Concordia Lutheran Ministries in Cabot, said the budget contains the first Medicaid increase in seven years.
“That is a welcomed increase from the state,” he said.
Hortert said it has been 16 years since the state last increased the personal care supplement.
For Medicaid clients, Concordia now receives the equivalent of $39 per day for each assisted-living and personal-care patient.
The new budget will bump that up by $7 per day, which will help, but still will not cover the $131 per-day cost of caring for each Medicaid patient.
“That’s part of our mission, to subsidize people, and when you have a number of subsidized people, $7 per day is a nice bump,” Hortert said.
Regarding skilled nursing care, the amount of state funding will increase by $35 per patient, per day.
While that might sound like an amount that would cover all costs, Hortert points out that wages have increased by 20% during the pandemic, and utilities are expected to increase by 42% by the end of the year.
He said the Medicaid rate that caregiver organizations receive has been inadequate for years in covering the costs of patients on that government assistance.
“We have been blessed over the years to try to manage in a responsible way,” Hortert said. “We still have the highest staffing ratios in the region, but we are trying to save all the nickels we can on smart buying.”
He said Concordia has used group purchasing methods for food and creative methods to save on utility costs.
“All those little things save you a nickel here or there, which allows you to operate,” Hortert said.
He said many nursing homes are going out of business, and the increases included in the new state budget could stave that off for a time.
But, as always, the rural, unserved care facilities will be greatly affected by continually increasing costs, he said.
“At the end of the day, it’s going to be the frail elderly who suffer,” Hortert said.
