Senators Release List of Poorly Performing Nursing Homes After Inquiry

Recently the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) responded to an inquiry from Sens. Bob Casey (D-PA) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) regarding underperforming nursing homes. CMS sent them a list of nursing homes with a recorded pattern of poor care and the senators released the information to the public along with a report and additional background information.

Under the Special Focus Facility (SFF) program, overseen by CMS, those facilities are made public; however, SFF candidate facilities are kept hidden. Sens. Casey and Toomey requested that those facilities be made public as well.  “When a family makes the hard decision to seek nursing home services for a loved one, they deserve to know if a facility under consideration suffers from systemic shortcomings. While the vast majority of nursing homes provide high-quality care, there are some that are consistently failing to meet objective standards of adequacy. To date, CMS has arbitrarily excluded from public disclosure a subset of these underperforming nursing homes. Moving forward, I hope CMS will give the public this particular list, as well as all relevant information about nursing home quality,” Sen. Toomey said.

Click here to read the list of SFF and SFF candidate facilities.