This story sickened me for a very peronsal reason: my Mom has dementia, and I have to get her home nursing care when I finally land another job. I have been working from home, and I am her primary care giver. So without further ado, here is a story about the despicable Joe Manchin, the heartless Republicans in charge of WV, and the people in the middle.
The Fight to Save the Manchin Nursing Home
The Manchin empire extends to a nondescript nursing home in deep coal country. It’s a relic of a social welfare system that has collapsed.
Until Tuesday, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) was listed as a corporate officer of a state-run nursing home in West Virginia, new reporting by the Prospect shows.
The John Manchin Sr. Health Care Center is one of four nursing homes operated by the state, which has the largest population of people with disabilities in the country. In a study by AARP and the Commonwealth Fund, West Virginia’s long-term care received the second-worst ranking of all 50 states.
The nursing home and an attached clinic serve Sen. Manchin’s home county of Marion, in deep coal country near the Pennsylvania border. The center opened in 1899 as a hospital for miners, and was renovated in the early ’80s by the senator’s brother, John Manchin Jr. On a filing with the West Virginia Secretary of State, the senator’s nephew, John Manchin III, is now listed twice as both a member and an organizer of the limited liability company (LLC).
Sen. Manchin was listed as the LLC’s organizer until Tuesday afternoon. Then, less than 24 hours after the Prospect contacted the senator’s Washington, D.C., office for comment, his name was removed from the filing. A spokesperson said, “Sen. Manchin is not affiliated with this facility and any filing that indicates he is was done incorrectly.”
Manchin did not respond to questions from the Prospect about whether the family’s nursing home played a role in his opposition to President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation. The elder care plank of the reconciliation spending bill aimed to fix a chronic care shortage chiefly by paying in-home caregivers, rather than sending more seniors to nursing homes.
Any material interest the Manchin family has in the center is trivial when compared with the senator’s sprawling interests in coal, which were in conflict with the green-energy investments proposed by Build Back Better.
But a bitter fight unfolding over the fate of the Manchin Center is emblematic of West Virginians’ struggle to preserve what’s left of the state’s defunct social safety net, something the Build Back Better Act might have ameliorated.
The article goes on to point out that the Manchin nursing home gets decent reviews by the locals who have no way to care for their relatives who have slipped into dementia. The Manchin nursing home takes in patients that other nursing homes do not want. And even though the place needs a serious upgrade, the locals do not want to see it closed.
BBB would have helped:
The Build Back Better plan, as passed by the House, included about $150 billion for Medicaid home and community-based services over ten years. It would have put funding toward remunerating home care workers, who are in chronic shortage, and reducing the backlog of care recipients waiting for in-home support. As the baby boomer generation ages, demand for home care services is rising.
An infusion of cash for home or community-based care, like the one proposed in Build Back Better, would have also eased the burden on government-operated facilities.
There are just over 150 state-run nursing facilities in the U.S., which is about 1 percent of nursing homes, according to AHCA/NCAL, an association representing assisted-living centers. While hospitals have faced staffing difficulties, the caregiver workforce shortage is even more acute in the nursing home industry. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that, from the start of the pandemic to November of last year, long-term care facilities lost some 234,000 employees.
But nope. Manchin doesn’t want BBB. And if you think he is alone in his villainy, here are the WV Republicans who want to just shutdown the Manchin nursing home:
Lawmakers and Marion County residents trace the push to shut down the state-run hospitals to Bill Crouch, secretary of the state Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR). Crouch has urged cutting costs and balancing the state budget, said Mike Caputo, a state senator from Marion County.
“There are people in these health care facilities across West Virginia that, quite frankly, don’t have anywhere else to go,” Caputo said, echoing Garcia.
In fact, Crouch agrees with their assessment.
“If someone can’t get placed in the private sector, it’s always been us taking these folks,” Crouch said at a meeting last October. The DHHR’s nursing homes, he said, “serve as a safety net for the most vulnerable, the most disadvantaged, the elderly. We take the patients who are more vulnerable and who are more difficult.”
An infusion of cash for home or community-based care, like the one proposed in Build Back Better, would have eased the burden on government-operated facilities.
That’s precisely why Crouch thinks it’s time to retire them. Since they take difficult patients who would be rejected elsewhere, Crouch has argued, they become costlier to run.
Along with Republican lawmakers who introduced a bill to close state-run care facilities, Crouch has said for years that the hospitals are run-down, and the cost of utilities and maintenance makes them impossible to keep open. He has taken advantage of the pandemic labor crunch in nursing to press ahead toward closure.
Garcia is skeptical of the cost-savings argument. He requested information on the center’s solvency and received a standard rundown breaking down shared state and federal Medicare costs, with no glaring losses.
Crouch has insisted that the Manchin Center cannot accept new patients during the pandemic, even when current residents pass away, despite a long waiting list. “They’re trying to prove that they won’t succeed,” Garcia said, adding that DHHR has cast state-run health facilities as a “scapegoat” for budget deficits.
“DHHR and its leadership philosophically believe that private hospitals are better than public institutions,” Garcia said.
Emphasis is mine.
So here we have Joe Manchin trying to duck responsibility for a nursing home his family owns that needs major improvements, and we also have WV Republicans eager to shut the place down and throw out the patients who rely upon the Manchin family nursing home. And the locals are the ones who are going to lose.
I wish Joe Manchin and the WV Republicans a warm place in Hell.