The article below is being partially posted from the Kansas City Star and written by Andy Marso. Read the entire article.
The state of Kansas had to take over 22 financially struggling nursing homes last year — the most anyone connected to the industry could remember.
Officials with the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services said they had no choice. Nursing home managers — most of them from out of state — had fallen behind on bills for basicslike food and utilities, putting residents’ health and safety at risk.
Now the Republican-controlled Legislature and Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly have come together on a plan to keep it from happening again.
Lawmakers this month passed a bill requested by the Kelly administration that will require much more financial information from people who apply for licenses to operate nursing homes.
“It gives us a better opportunity to maybe know in advance if somebody coming in is maybe in financial difficulties,” said Rep. Brenda Landwehr, a Wichita Republican who chairs the House Health and Human Services Committee. “It’s never going to solve it (completely) but there should be fewer we have to take over in the future.”
The Star reported last year that when Kansas issued the 15 licenses to Skyline in 2016, the company was already missing payments to vendors for things like laundry, housekeeping and food for its facilities in other states. According to a lawsuit filed by one of the vendors, Skyline owed almost $2 million when it was granted its Kansas licenses.
At the time, the state required applicants to provide financial statements showing they had enough cash or equity to meet at least one month’s operating expenses, a threshold that an industry expert told The Star was “the bare minimum.”
The new requirements were added to Senate Bill 15, a package of health care legislation that passed almost unanimously.
Under the new law, nursing home applicants must furnish a detailed budget for the first 12 months of operation, which matches Missouri law. They must also document that they have enough working capital to carry out that budget, and they must provide a list of all other nursing homes in the U.S. or abroad where they have ever had an ownership stake.
It also streamlines the legal process for the state to take receivership of nursing homes, which requires a court order.
“The overall purpose of this legislation is to ensure the health, safety, welfare and continuity of care for residents,” said Cara Sloan, a spokeswoman for the state’s aging and disability department.
One of the nursing homes the state took over last year, Fort Scott Manor, had to close, and the court-appointed receiver is still looking for potential buyers for the others.
Meanwhile, the state has turned over operations temporarily to Mission Health, a Florida-based chain that already ran more than a dozen nursing homes in Kansas. The state has subsidized their operations through a civil monetary penalty fund made up of fines paid by nursing homes for poor care.
