The Strib covers Dayton’s proposed cuts to nursing homes and the shock that greeted those cuts among lobbyists for the nursing home industry. Disability advocates would likely be quick to point out that proposed cuts to home and community-based services are much deeper than those targeting facilities and that facilities have escaped previous cuts while HCBS providers have already suffered cuts in recent years. There’s no sign that the two groups are openly squabbling about which group is more deserving of public dollars, but the likelihood of such ugliness can only increase in the coming weeks. These groups would be smart to join forces and seek a fair and equitable solution to the deficit that does minimal harm to both of their interests. But given the sometimes rocky relationship between the two groups in past legislative sessions, any notion of a united front may be a faint hope.
The bigger problem, of course, is the continued institutional bias in Medicaid that is perpetuated by both Republican and Democratic leaders. The fact that nursing facilities employ lots of people and are often the sole drivers of economic prosperity in rural communities has given them political clout, which sometimes overshadows more fundamental questions about whether nursing facilities can provide the best care to people using limited public funds. Maybe they are are still a good investment, but I’m disappointed that the Dayton administration seems unwilling to examine the issue more closely.
