Lawmakers may raise allowance for nursing home residents
NASHVILLE (AP) — Nursing home resident Elizabeth Bledsoe uses the $30 she is allotted each month from her Social Security benefit to pay her phone bill and burial insurance premium and buy one newspaper a week.
When she finishes, there’s no money left over to buy the things most people take for granted — like postage stamps, socks, hand lotion and tissues. In fact, she’s $14 in the hole.
“It’s not a very good feeling to know you’re not making your expenses for the month. It makes me feel very dejected and sad to know I worked all those years to make a good income” and can’t even pay for basic things like toiletries, she said.
Bledsoe, 59, has been a resident of Bordeaux Nursing Home in Nashville since she suffered a stroke three years ago that left her partially paralyzed and unable to care for herself. Until then, she’d spent 30 years working for BellSouth.
Her $1,470 monthly Social Security disability payment goes directly to the nursing home for her care — all but $30 allocated as a “personal needs allowance” for low-income patients covered by Medicaid.
The allowance hasn’t been raised by the state since it was implemented in 1988. The money helps pay for things not typically provided by nursing homes, including clothing, snacks, paper and pens, shower caps, books and telephone service within a resident’s room.
Bledsoe testified via videotape to the state Senate’s General Welfare Committee Wednesday in support of a $20 jump in that allowance for Medicaid-subsidized patients. A change would affect about three-fourths of the 39,000 nursing home residents in Tennessee.
Pushing the allowance to $50 a month would bring Tennessee in line with a “majority of states” across the nation, according to the Tennessee AARP, an advocacy group for retirees and the primary backer of the bill.
“Thirty dollars just simply isn’t enough to meet the very basic needs of nursing home residents,” AARP lobbyist Brian McGuire said. “Most nursing home residents on Medicaid don’t have someone around to supplement that $30. … It’s a matter of fairness.”
The increase, as the bill is currently written, would cost $6.4 million — $4.2 million of which the federal government currently pays nursing homes, with remaining $2.2 million coming from the state. The plan prompted objections from industry representatives and several senators.
“We certainly support increasing the personal needs allowance, we think that’s a good idea,” said Ron Taylor, a lobbyist for the Tennessee Health Care Association, which represents nursing homes across the state. “What we think is a bad idea is paying for it out of nursing home reimbursements.”
Taylor said that the “$6.4 million hit” would mean an individual nursing home might have to eliminate a licensed practical nurse, 1 1/2 nursing aides or a dietary aide.
Sen. Curtis Person, R-Memphis, told his colleagues he supported the increase, but did not want to pass the cost on to nursing homes — especially since legislation is pending in the General Assembly that would require nursing homes to spend $15 million to add sprinkler systems to those currently without.
“To add this cost on top of that would have a detrimental impact on the industry,” Person said.
The committee eventually decided to put off a vote on the measure for two weeks so the AARP, the nursing home industry and state officials could work on a compromise in funding.
“We want to do this, but we’ve got to find an appropriate way to do it,” committee Chairman John Ford, D-Memphis, said. “I’m not so sure we would be doing that right now.”
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On the Net:
AARP of Tennessee, http://www.aarp.org/states/tn/
Tennessee Health Care Association, http://www.thca.org/