President Donald Trump has provided "strong leadership" throughout the coronavirus pandemic, Seema Verma, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid administrator, told Newsmax TV's "Greg Kelly Reports."
"From day one, President Trump has shown strong leadership in understanding nursing homes were going to be stressed by this situation. We're talking about an unprecedented situation where you have a virus that attacks those elderly individuals with underlying health conditions, living in close quarters with a very contagious virus.
Trump on Monday delivered new guidance on how nursing homes can eventually reopen to visitors. For nursing home visitation restrictions to ease, state and local coronavirus infections must decline and nursing home staff and residents need to get tested for the disease.
"I thought the president took action early on. We doubled down on infection control guidelines, we put those out to nursing homes and all health care systems across the country, and we followed up pretty much every couple of weeks. We've been using the latest data and science from our surveys of nursing homes and the CDC investigation of nursing homes to update our guidelines," Verna said.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, one-third of all coronavirus deaths occur in nursing homes and over half of the deaths in 14 states.
CMS is calling for nursing home staff to receive weekly coronavirus tests and daily screenings for respiratory symptoms. The agency also wants state officials to inspect nursing homes with prior coronavirus cases before allowing visitations to continue.
"We've also called for transparency so that patients and their families have a better understanding of what's going on in nursing homes and they can know if there's coronavirus inside the nursing home. And then the president has called on all of the nation's inspectors to go into nursing homes to make sure they're adhering to those federal guidelines."
To punish non-compliant nursing homes, Verma said the federal government has the authority to withhold Medicare or Medicaid reimbursements. But the state can withhold licensing within the state.
"At the end of the day, this is a federal-state partnership, and the governors are boots on the ground and we've appreciated the strong leadership that we've seen from many governors, whether it's testing their nursing homes, using the national guard to clean their nursing homes and to also focus on inspections."
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