BOSTON -- Bills that aim to facilitate the development of smaller, residential-style nursing home units and affordable assisted living options earned the unanimous endorsement from the Elder Affairs Committee on Tuesday.
Meeting in a brief executive session, members of the committee voted 5-0 to advance a Sen. Patricia Jehlen bill (S 363) charging the Department of Public Health with developing regulations for "small house nursing homes," units in a larger facility that are "designed and modeled as a private home" for up to 14 individuals.
The committee also voted 5-0 in favor of another Jehlen bill that would allow the Executive Office of Health and Human Services to apply for federal waivers so Medicaid-qualifying individuals who are "at risk of entering a nursing home" could instead "reside in a certified assisted living residence."
Jehlen, a Somerville Democrat who co-chairs the Elder Affairs Committee with Rep. Ruth Balser of Newton, said residents of assisted living are predominantly middle-income, and poor people often do not have access to assisted living. "A frail elder waiver would be among the tools that would make it possible to develop affordable assisted living," she said.
Jehlen told the News Service she thinks both bills could end up as discussion topics for a future state task force on nursing homes.
The House and Senate versions of next year's state budget each include an outside section establishing a task force to study the financial stability of Massachusetts nursing homes, though their approaches differ slightly.
The House envisions a panel chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Marylou Sudders or her designee, with policy recommendations due to be filed one year after the budget is signed into law and takes effect.
Under the Senate language, Balser and Jehlen would co-chair the task force, which would have until Nov. 1 to file its report.
The House budget included $35 million towards increasing nursing home supplemental rates, and the Senate created a $15 million targeted investment fund. The differences between the two branches' bills will eventually be ironed out by a six-member conference committee.
Senate Ways and Means Chairman Michael Rodrigues outlined some of the challenges facing the industry as the Senate embarked on its budget debate last week.
Rodrigues, a Westport Democrat, said five nursing homes in his part of the state had closed in the past month. He said he's heard from nursing home operators who are "very much stressed and on the brink."
"This is a very complex issue, because we -- all of us -- collectively have spent a lot of time, effort, and invested a lot of money in trying to determine how to best keep our elders, our aging elders, out of nursing homes by providing at-home services, by providing home health aides and visiting nurses and meals on wheels and sundry services to improve the quality of life for our elders to age in their homes," he said on the Senate floor on May 21. "But what that has resulted in is the fact that there does reach a point in time where an individual might have to go to a nursing home for the amount of care that they need, and the acuity level for that individual is much higher than it probably would have been if they had gone into a nursing home months or perhaps years earlier."
Sen. Marc Pacheco, advocating for nursing home-related amendments that were ultimately rejected, sounded an alarm on industry finances during last week's debate, pointing to the Taunton Nursing Home, a municipal facility in Taunton that's planning to close.
"If you can't have a public, municipally run nursing home survive with the rates we're sending nursing homes, how the heck is any other nursing home in the commonwealth going to remain open?" Pacheco said. "This is one of the biggest issues that we face as a society here in Massachusetts right now. We have such a gap in the funding, I don't know what we're going to do."