Opinion: Selling-out nursing home residents

Gov. Jeb Bush and his point-man Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan promised Floridians a balanced package on nursing homes, one focused as much on enhancing the quality of care homes provide as on reducing the litigation they face. But the administration's troubling coziness with the industry has helped produce a House bill so lopsided in favor of nursing homes that even its original authors, Reps. Carole Green, R-Fort Myers, and Nancy Argenziano, R-Dunnellon, are threatening to vote against it. Unless some sense of fairness is restored to the bill, that's exactly what lawmakers should do.

Prodded by Brogan and House Speaker Tom Feeney, the House Fiscal Responsibility Council this week took back several constructive changes Argenziano's committee had made just a day earlier. The panel cut so deeply into the bill's quality-of-care provisions that it left behind little more than a tort bill in disguise.

Bucking federal recommendations, the council rolled back nurse-staff increases from 2.9 (hours per day) to 2.6 -- and diluted the bill even further by allowing homes to count housekeepers, dieticians and other non-nurse personnel toward the minimum level. It cut mandatory background checks on employees, knowing that the bill also gives homes greater liability protection when they hire dangerous workers. It weakened protections for whistleblowers and otherwise undercut regulatory enforcement. Yet the council only strengthened the limitations on lawsuits, including retroactive provisions making punitive damages all but impossible to win.

Florida has enough money to raise staffing levels fully if it wanted to, despite the council's whining to the contrary. Its hatchet-job suggests that what's really going on is less about saving taxpayer money than about selling out nursing-home residents -- a perception fueled by Brogan's behind-the-scenes meetings with nursing-home lobbyists to which trial lawyers were conspicuously not invited.

"We've given up a lot on the promise that nursing-home residents would be better protected," Florida Academy of Trial Lawyers president Lance Block told the Times. "We feel like we got suckered."

They're not the only ones.

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