Ohio governor strikes $30M nursing home bonuses

JULIE CARR SMYTH

Asso­ci­ated Press

COLUMBUS — Ohio Gov. John Kasich signed a wide-ranging midterm bud­get bill Mon­day after remov­ing $30 mil­lion that law­mak­ers had set aside for bonuses to high-quality nurs­ing homes and strik­ing a num­ber of other provisions.

The pol­icy and spend­ing mea­sure trims state spend­ing by nearly $13.6 mil­lion as well as mak­ing pol­icy changes aimed at help­ing gov­ern­ment oper­ate with less.

The leg­is­la­tion changes some laws to allow local gov­ern­ments to share cer­tain ser­vices, and it elim­i­nates or alters the roles of var­i­ous gov­ern­ment boards and commissions.

In a mes­sage explain­ing his line-item vetoes of the nurs­ing home bonuses and a dozen other items, Kasich said law­mak­ers approved new ground rules for reim­burs­ing nurs­ing home ear­lier this ses­sion, and the bonus pay­ments could not be justified.

“This pro­vi­sion would mod­ify that (reim­burse­ment) method­ol­ogy and increase pay­ments to nurs­ing facil­i­ties, while no new data has been pre­sented to jus­tify those changes, demon­strate a need, or explain the ratio­nale for this spe­cific amount,” he wrote.

He also cited “sig­nif­i­cant imple­men­ta­tion prob­lems” with the bonus program.

The Ohio Health Care Asso­ci­a­tion, the state’s largest orga­ni­za­tion of long-term care providers rep­re­sent­ing 700 facil­i­ties, expressed dis­ap­point­ment with the line-item veto.

The association’s exec­u­tive direc­tor, Pete Van Run­kle, said nurs­ing homes are strug­gling finan­cially in the wake of $360 mil­lion in Med­ic­aid cuts and more than $400 mil­lion in Medicare cuts in the last year. He said the bonus pay­ments would have been tied to qual­ity mea­sures devel­oped by a team Kasich’s admin­is­tra­tion led.

“Tying reim­burse­ment to qual­ity is a hall­mark of the administration’s pol­icy for health care, which makes this veto dou­bly frus­trat­ing,” Van Run­kle said in a statement.

The unusual off-cycle bud­get bill was Kasich’s cre­ation. He based it on the one-year bud­get cycle of the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, which con­trasts with Ohio’s two-year cycle. Kasich is a for­mer Repub­li­can con­gress­man, and served as chair­man of the U.S. House bud­get com­mit­tee in the 1990s.

Other items Kasich struck from the bill were:

—A pro­vi­sion that would have allowed local school dis­tricts to uni­lat­er­ally adjust build­ing con­struc­tion agree­ments in order to reduce their agreed-upon share of costs, which Kasich said would poten­tially raise the state’s costs and adversely impact aver­age tax­pay­ers to the ben­e­fit of a few “select districts”;

—A two-year, $1.5 mil­lion pilot pro­gram in But­ler, Cler­mont, Hamil­ton and War­ren coun­ties that would have pro­vided home repairs and mod­i­fi­ca­tions for 180 eli­gi­ble elderly or home­bound indi­vid­u­als, which he said would have been duplicative;

—A $1 mil­lion inter­ven­tion pilot pro­gram for about 150 opi­ate– or alcohol-addicted offend­ers fac­ing or fin­ish­ing time in prison or a halfway house, which he said was too nar­rowly focused on a sin­gle medication;

—A pro­posed sales and use tax exemp­tion for aero­space vehi­cle research, which he said was an unjus­ti­fied ben­e­fit to one industry;

—A $500,000 pilot project in up to seven South­west Ohio coun­ties to test bio­met­ric authen­ti­ca­tion as a way of pre­vent­ing patients from vis­it­ing mul­ti­ple loca­tions or doc­tors to get extra pre­scrip­tions of dan­ger­ous drugs, whose tim­ing and fund­ing source — money that would have come from a fund estab­lished to tackle the state’s “pill mill” prob­lem — he called problematic;

—A require­ment that the state attor­ney gen­eral approve cer­tain con­struc­tion man­age­ment con­tracts, a duty is a new duty “incon­gru­ent” with the office’s mission;

—A pro­vi­sion seek­ing addi­tional infor­ma­tion on the Ohio oper­a­tions of busi­nesses seek­ing state con­tracts, a report­ing require­ment which he said could have deterred ven­dors and poten­tially increased costs.

Despite the vetoes, the bill is still packed with pol­icy and bud­get changes.

Law­mak­ers over­whelmed with the com­plex­ity and vol­ume of the revi­sions brought to them by Kasich — and in a leg­isla­tive elec­tion year — split the orig­i­nal bill into sev­eral pieces. They also side­lined some of his pro­pos­als, most notably a pro­posed sev­er­ance tax increase on oil and gas pro­duc­ers. Kasich wants to use the money for mod­est statewide income-tax relief in two or three years.

House and Sen­ate nego­ti­a­tions on the bill were also slowed in their final days by attempts to insert con­tentious lan­guage requir­ing wel­fare recip­i­ents to undergo drug test­ing. Repub­li­cans removed that man­date and said it would be pur­sued in sep­a­rate legislation.

The bill includes $500,000 in startup costs to imple­ment a new exotic ani­mal reg­u­la­tion and reg­is­tra­tion sys­tem in the state, $42 mil­lion for the Clean Ohio fund that pre­serves farm­land and green spaces, and another $3 mil­lion for a Lake Erie pro­tec­tion program.

The mea­sure also includes $15 mil­lion for clean­ing up aban­doned fac­tory sites.

Posted by AP News on Jun 11 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.