this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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The Biden administration finalized on Monday the first-ever minimum staffing rule at nursing homes, Vice President Kamala Harris announced.

The controversial mandate requires that all nursing homes that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding provide a total of at least 3.48 hours of nursing care per resident per day, including defined periods from registered nurses and from nurse aides. That means a facility with 100 residents would need at least two or three registered nurses and at least 10 or 11 nurse aides, as well as two additional nurse staff, who could be registered nurses, licensed professional nurses or nurse aides, per shift, according to a White House fact sheet.

Plus, nursing homes must have a registered nurse onsite at all times. The mandate will be phased in, with rural communities having longer timeframes, and temporary exemptions will be available for facilities in areas with workforce shortages that demonstrate a good faith effort to hire.

The rule, which was first proposed in September and initially called for at least three hours of daily nursing care per resident, is aimed at addressing nursing homes that are chronically understaffed, which can lead to sub-standard or unsafe care, the White House said.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's not controversial if only monied interests say so.

Good for the admin though keep pushing.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I often go to nursing homes for medical calls, and asking for basic patient information is always a treat at the crappier ones.

Pro-tip: when the medic asks you things like "What are we here for?", "How long have they been having this issue?", or "What's their medical history?" you don't actually have to answer. Just give a blank stare and say "I don't know, I just started my shift" or "They're not my patient". All you have to do is give the ambulance crew the patient's name and birthday, and even that's optional.

Is the patient dead and you don't know when it happened? Say "I was talking to them a few minutes ago!" even if they're cold to the touch. Bonus points if the pt has a DNR and you don't give it to the medic.

If all that is too much work, say "I'll go check" and find somewhere to hide until they leave with the patient -- this situation is their problem now.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I work in 911 dispatch, nursing homes are one of the banes of my existence.

Do they have any medical history we should know about?
No.
Oh, I guess they're just putting perfectly healthy 57 year olds in nursing homes now, good to know.

Half of them can't tell me the address of the damn place they work, which is really nice when they call from their cell phone which barely gets any signal inside the building. Sometimes it's a crapshoot if they can even tell me the name of the facility

For whole lot of the people who work there, at least at the homes around me, English isn't their first language, and they don't speak or understand it very well and speak with a very heavy accent. I'm not knocking them just for that though, they speak more languages than I do, and are clearly trying to make a better life for themselves, I certainly can't fault them for that, but it does make me a little concerned for their patients. If I, as someone with all of my mental faculties and hearing intact, can barely communicate with you, how effectively can they be treating and supporting patients who often have significant cognitive and/or hearing impairments?

Don't get me started on the med techs. I'm not any kind of a healthcare professional, so I have only the vaguest idea what their role actually is in a nursing home, but from when they call 911 you would get the impression that they're kept in a dark soundproof closet until they need someone to call 911, then they're abruptly yanked out of the closet, spun around a few times, hit over the head with the phone, and told to call 911 while a strobe light flashes in their face, because they never have any idea what's going on

Now don't get me wrong, some nursing home staff are great, they have all of the information ready when they call, they're polite, professional, everything I could hope for, but unfortunately they're kind of the exception. 90% of the time when I see a call coming in from a nursing home I need to brace myself to deal with someone who is just an absolute mess, disorganized, ill-prepared, unintelligible, uncooperative, sometimes outright rude. Sometimes I consider myself lucky if they don't just outright hang up on me halfway through the call.

Also some of them love medical jargon, and as I said I'm not a medical professional. They'll call, rattle off a bunch of stats and vitals that mean nothing to me and aren't going in my notes even if I could type as fast as they're spitting them out. When I try to determine what the chief complaint is they'll spit out something like "their potassium is low," forcing me to ask for further clarification in plain english, so I know whether to code it as a cardiac thing, a respiratory thing, etc.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Your comment about people who don't speak English fluently reminded me to take a moment to appreciate that there are a non-zero number of asshole racists who, by nature of being cared for by (at least in some circumstances) people of varied races, do indeed die mad.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

That makes me think of my own grandfather (in a good way) I will never claim that he was the most forward-thinking, tolerant, or politically correct person out there, there were a few stereotypes and bits out outdated terminology he never quite shook (for example, the term "colored" never quite left his vocabulary, and he had a tiny bit of lingering distrust of the Japanese having served in the Pacific during WWII)

But for a man who grew up in the time he did, he wasn't half-bad.

He was never someone who was above holding a a grudge, and he'd gladly tell anyone who would listen who he didn't like and why. His reasons weren't always good, he got mad at people over a lot of petty bullshit, but I never heard him disparage someone because of their race. He ended up in a nursing home where a lot of the staff was black, and we never heard a peep from him about their race, he found plenty of other things to complain about, but there was no racial bias to it, he complained about the white employees as much or more than the black ones.

Little bit of fun family history with him, for most of his life he worked as a bus driver. Buses in our part of the country were racially integrated from pretty early on so that was never something he dealt with directly, but he did drive his bus at the same time that bus boycotts and such would have been happening in other parts of the country. He never told us this story himself, we heard it from some other older locals who remembered him driving the bus. There was one particular bus stop that was near a business that employed a lot of black women, and many of them took the bus. The bus would come at around the same time the business closed for the night, so they didn't have much time to get to the stop before the bus came. A lot of other drivers wouldn't wait for them, but my grandfather always did, and decades later many of them still remembered him for that.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The controversial mandate

I wonder what the controversy is...

Nursing home operators strongly objected to the minimum staffing proposal in September, saying they already struggle to fill open positions. Such a requirement could force some facilities to close.

Oh, of course, they don't want to pay people. These business owners should go back to econ 101, the labour market is just another market. If you can't get enough people at current prices, you need to PAY MORE.

Mark Parkinson, CEO of the American Health Care Association, said in a statement Monday. “Issuing a final rule that demands hundreds of thousands of additional caregivers when there’s a nationwide shortfall of nurses just creates an impossible task for providers. This unfunded mandate doesn’t magically solve the nursing crisis.”

Oh, it's funded. Two steps. Grab your wallet, Mark. Look in your wallet. There is your funding.

The proposed staffing mandate has also split Congress, whose approval is not required. A bipartisan Senate bill and similar legislation introduced by House Republicans would prohibit the Department of Health and Human Services from finalizing the rule.

The only time you can reliably expect the US Congress to actually do anything for their fat paychecks is when it has to prevent other people in government to do their jobs.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Oh, of course, they don’t want to pay people

Even if they could...

Were like 3 years deep into a nationwide nursing shortage and even hospitals can't get staffed up.

Biden is "creating jobs" that we literally don't have qualified people to fill.

Which is going to lead to lots of nursing homes being forced to close, and shitty nurses always having a place to land somewhere.

You know what would help?

If Biden had fixed our student loan shit show so more people are able to afford to be nurses.

Like most of the headlines about Biden, it only sounds good if you don't think further than the headline.

Down the road this causes more problems than it'll fix.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

My sister is a nurse. Hospitals are constantly trying to put more and more workload per nurse than is feasible/safe. That sounds like it's to your point, but it isn't really. My sister was making like $25 per hour before covid. Her job was to take care of NICU babies. For $25 per hour, with a degree and a fair amount of student loan debt. And they keep adding responsibilities and assume they will work overtime "for the babies".

Why would anyone want to go to school to get into an underpaid field where literal babies' lives are constantly in your hands, and the hospital is trying their hardest to decrease their nursing payout by decreasing nursing staff?

We need regulation. Nurses are quitting the field because they cannot handle the stress and the pay certainly isn't worth it.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago

That sounds like it’s to your point

My point is we need more nurses.

And the cost of our educational system prevents many from becoming nurses.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Most of these positions do not require a college degree. They don't need RN's- a lot of these positions can be filled by high school kids. My wife and a lot of our friends in high school and college worked these jobs. My neighbor did in-home care for decades with no degree and recently chose to retire early because the pay wasn't worth staying and she makes more money buying and selling antiques at conventions now.

How many other qualified people have been forced out of the industry due to low wages?

Your comments on Biden seem to indicate You're either uninformed or purposefully spreading political misinformation. A quick internet search will tell you the Biden administration has forgiven $153 billion in student loans. It would be more if the Supreme Court hasn't shut down his broader cancellation measures last year.

Is he doing everything he can? Well I've seen tons of proposals for other measures to cap the tuition costs or change federal lending, but afaik just about everything would require a bill to be passed by Congress. This may shock you, but Biden can to vote in either the House of Representatives or the Senate so you need to find your own representatives, find their stances, and write to them about this (or anything else you care about).

Unless you have some other proposal I haven't heard of for executive action that could survive the supreme court?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago

They don’t need RN’s- a lot of these positions can be filled by high school kids.

Man, the article is right there...

The controversial mandate requires that all nursing homes that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding provide a total of at least 3.48 hours of nursing care per resident per day, including defined periods from registered nurses and from nurse aides. That means a facility with 100 residents would need at least two or three registered nurses and at least 10 or 11 nurse aides, as well as two additional nurse staff, who could be registered nurses, licensed professional nurses or nurse aides, per shift, according to a White House fact sheet.

CNA requirement vary by state, but I don't know any where you don't need a highschool degree.

Among other things.

https://www.practicalnursing.org/allied-healthcare/certified-nursing-assistant

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Shortage? No such thing as a labor shortage. Humans are not scarce.

Pay more, and workers will follow. If they do not follow, then it’s not worth it to them. Make it worthwhile.

Affordability? I guarantee if you pay enough they’ll be able to afford the profession!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

We need more of these jobs to have similar paths like blue collar ones. Where you can learn being an apprentice to someone else and take classes on the clock and paid for by the employer. Makes it more accessible for more people and the employer knows how they're getting trained, and that they're gonna be ready to work once they're done.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago

That's pretty much how the rest of the federal government works.

At some point you really need a bachelor's, and again a masters. But you can start entry level and move up.

If we nationalized our healthcare system (like every other 1st world country) you'd likely get your wish. Along with a lot of other things the majority of voters want.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Shortage? No such thing as a labor shortage. Humans are not scarce

They're not.

But nurses are, have been for years.

It's not a matter of pay, you can't just snap your fingers and get a nursing degree...

Affordability? I guarantee if you pay enough they’ll be able to afford the profession!

Just go into tens of thousands of debt, and four years from now after a shit ton of nursing homes close well have plenty of nurses!

Brilliant plan.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What does nursing school cost there? What type of nursing degree is needed to fill the roles that are short? Most nurses here don't need a multi-year course. The entry level nurse position is a 6 month course. Do elderly care facilities need a higher degree than the entry level? Or does that not exist there? The higher nursing degree is a proper medical degree and of course takes years, but I don't think that's the kind of nurses needed for this is it?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What does nursing school cost there?

America?

This works better if you don't ask 10 questions in a single paragraph bud.

Ideally you'd just Google them tho, would be waaaaay faster.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't think they're asking questions because they don't know / can't find the answer, they're asking questions to you specifically to try and coax you into thinking critically. It seems that they have failed, but that says more about you than them.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

And if they tell me where they'll asking about, I'll answer the first one.

But there's hardly any context, I'd have to ask for clarification for every single question they're "just asking".

It's a time sink, but I'd probably answer a couple if they kept it civil.

And if you think that was the Socratic method...

You might want to read up on it again.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

They were completely civil, you're the one slinging thinly veiled insults. Speaking of which, you should work on your grammar before needlessly insulting my intelligence. Your first sentence is a train wreck.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago

Welp, this is an easy block when all you're doing is arguing.

Have a nice life champ.