The federal government accelerated its crackdown on nursing homes that go days without a registered nurse by downgrading the rankings of a tenth of the nation’s homes on Medicare’s consumer website, new records show.

In its update in April to Nursing Home Compare, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services gave its lowest star rating for staffing — one star on its five-star scale — to 1,638 homes. Most were downgraded because their payroll records reported no registered-nurse hours at all for four days or more, while the remainder failed to submit their payroll records or sent data that couldn’t be verified through an audit.

If you would like a copy of this data, please email elucas@kff.org

“Once you’re past four days [without registered nursing], it’s probably beyond calling in sick,” said David Grabowski, a health policy professor at Harvard Medical School. “It’s probably a systemic problem.”

It was a tougher standard than Medicare had previously applied, when it demoted nursing homes with seven or more days without a registered nurse.

“Nurse staffing has the greatest impact on the quality of care nursing homes deliver, which is why CMS analyzed the relationship between staffing levels and outcomes,” the agency announced in March. “CMS found that as staffing levels increase, quality increases.”

The latest batch of payroll records, released in April, shows that even more nursing homes fell short of Medicare’s requirement that a registered nurse be on-site at least eight hours every day. Over the final three months of 2018, 2,633 of the nation’s 15,563 nursing homes reported that for four or more days, registered nurses worked fewer than eight hours, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis. Those facilities did not meet Medicare’s requirement even after counting nurses whose jobs are primarily administrative.

CMS has been alarmed at the frequency of understaffing of registered nurses — the most highly trained category of nurses in a home — since the government last year began requiring homes to submit payroll records to verify staffing levels. Before that, Nursing Home Compare relied on two-week snapshots nursing homes reported to health inspectors when they visited — a method officials worried was too easy to manipulate. The records show staffing on weekends is often particularly anemic.

CMS’s demotion of ratings on staffing is not as severe as it might seem, however. More than half of those homes were given a higher rating than one star for their overall assessment after CMS weighed inspection results and the facilities’ own measurement of residents’ health improvements.

That overall rating is the one that garners the most attention on Nursing Home Compare and that some hospitals use when recommending where discharged patients might go. Of the 1,638 demoted nursing homes, 277 were rated as average in overall quality (three stars), 175 received four stars, and 48 received the top rating of five stars.

Still, CMS’s overall changes to how the government assigns stars drew protests from nursing home groups. The American Health Care Association, a trade group for nursing homes, calculated that 36% of homes saw a drop in their ratings while 15% received improved ratings.

“By moving the scoring ‘goal posts’ for two components of the Five-Star system,” the association wrote, “CMS will cause more than 30 percent of nursing centers nationwide to lose one or more stars overnight — even though nothing changed in staffing levels and in quality of care, which is still being practiced and delivered every day.”

The association said in an email that the payroll records might exaggerate the absence of staff through unintentional omissions that homes make when submitting the data or because of problems on the government’s end. The association said it had raised concerns that salaried nurses face obstacles in recording time they worked above 40 hours a week. Also, the association added, homes must deduct a half-hour for every eight-hour shift for a meal break, even if the nurse worked through it.

“Some of our member nursing homes have told us that their data is not showing up correctly on Nursing Home Compare, making it appear that they do not have the nurses and other staff that they in fact do have on duty,” LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit medical providers including nursing homes, said last year.

Kaiser Health News has updated its interactive nursing home staffing tool with the latest data. You can use the tool to see the rating Medicare assigns to each facility for its registered nurse staffing and overall staffing levels. The tool also shows KHN-calculated ratios of patients to direct-care nurses and aides on the best- and worst-staffed days.

Jordan Rau: jrau@kff.org, @JordanRau

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*The Massachusetts State House, with its famous gold dome.*

By MARTHA BEBINGER

For Kaiser Health News

States serve as “laboratories of democracy,” as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said. And states are also labs for health policy, launching all kinds of experiments lately to temper spending on pharmaceuticals.

No wonder. Drugs are among the fastest-rising health-care costs for many consumers and are a key reason that health-care spending dominates many state budgets — crowding out roads, schools and other priorities.

Consider Vermont, California and Oregon, states that are beginning to implement drug-price transparency laws. In Nevada, the push for transparency includes the markup charged by pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). In May, Louisiana joined a growing list of states banning “gag rules” that prevent pharmacists from discussing drug prices with patients.

State-based experiments may carry even greater weight for Medicaid, the federal-state partnership that covers roughly 75 million low-income or disabled Americans.

Ohio is targeting the fees charged to its Medicaid program by PBMs. New York has established a Medicaid spending drug cap. In late June, Oklahoma’s Medicaid program was approved by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to begin “value-based purchasing” for some newer, more expensive drugs: When drugs don’t work, the state would pay less for them.

But around the same time, CMS denied a proposal from Massachusetts that was seen as the boldest attempt yet to control Medicaid drug spending.

Massachusetts planned to exclude expensive drugs that weren’t proven to work better than existing alternatives. The state said Medicaid drug spending had doubled in five years. Massachusetts wanted to negotiate prices for about 1 percent of the highest-priced drugs and stop covering some of them. CMS rejected the proposal without much explanation, beyond saying Massachusetts couldn’t do what it wanted and continue to receive the deep discounts drugmakers are required by law to give state Medicaid programs.

The Medicaid discounts were established in 1990 law based on a grand bargain that drugmakers say guaranteed coverage of all medicines approved by the Food and Drug Administration in exchange for favorable prices.

The New England Journal of Medicine dives into the CMS decision regarding Massachusetts and its implications for other state Medicaid programs in a commentary by Rachel Sachs, an associate professor of law at Washington University, in St. Louis, and co-author Nicholas Bagley. They dispute the Trump administration’s claim that Massachusetts’ plan would violate the grand bargain.

We talked with Sachs about Massachusetts’s proposal and the implications for the rest of the country. Her answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Why do you think states, such as Massachusetts, should be allowed to exclude some drugs, a move the pharmaceutical industry has said would break the deal reached back in 1990?

In our view, there’s a way to frame it where the bargain has been broken and Massachusetts is simply trying to restore the balance. The problem is that the meaning of FDA approval has changed significantly over the last almost 30 years. Now we have a lot more drugs that are being approved more quickly, on the basis of less evidence — smaller trials, using surrogate endpoints — where the state has real questions about whether these drugs work at all, not only whether they are good value for the money.

Q: You suggest that Massachusetts could make a reasonable case if it chose to challenge the CMS denial. How?

CMS did not explain why it didn’t grant Massachusetts’ waiver. It needs to give reasons for denying something that Massachusetts, in our view, has the legal ability to do. CMS’ failure to give reasons in this case resembles their failure to give reasons in a number of other cases that have recently led courts to strike down actions by the Trump administration for failure to explain the actions that they were taking.

(Note: A spokeswoman for Health and Human Services in Massachusetts says the state is not going to challenge the CMS decision.)

Q: While CMS blocked the Massachusetts experiment, it has approved the value-based purchasing plan in Oklahoma, and New York has capped its Medicaid drug spending. Aren’t those signs of flexibility for states?

In some ways, yes, and in other ways, no. New York passed a cap on state Medicaid pharmaceutical spending. But once the state hits that cap, it doesn’t mean the state will stop paying for prescription drugs. It just means the state is empowered to negotiate with some of these companies and seek additional discounts. They didn’t need CMS approval for this. New York doesn’t have the ability to say “If you don’t take this deal, we’re not going to cover this product.”

Oklahoma is pursuing outcomes-based pricing, which is of interest. It’s the first state to express interest in doing so. However, there are a lot of observers who are skeptical that outcomes agreements of this kind will materially lower prices or if they just provide companies cover to charge higher prices in the first instance.

Q: So what options do you see ahead for states given what happened in Massachusetts with the Medicaid waiver?

Unfortunately, states are quite limited in what they’re able to do on their own, in terms of controlling prescription drug costs — both costs that are borne by the state in its capacity as a public employer and its capacity as an insurer for the Medicaid population. and then more generally for the many citizens who are on private insurance plans throughout the state.

This is a real problem, this concern of federal pre-emption where states’ ability to go beyond federal law is often limited. So what we’re seeing now is more states like Massachusetts and Vermont taking action that forces the federal government to do something or say something. States are increasingly putting pressure on the federal government because they know that their ability to act on this problem of drug pricing is limited.

This story is part of a partnership that includes WBUR, NPR and Kaiser Health News.