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Facing Chronic Nursing Home Problems, Mass. Task Force Gets To Work

The empty Massachusetts House chamber.
State of Massachusetts
The Massachusetts house chamber.

A task force this week is taking on the job of examining problems in the nursing home industry. This comes the week after a state audit found public health investigations into elder abuse at nursing homes were taking too long. 

Matt Murphy, State House News Service: This audit done by Auditor Suzanne Bump kind of exposed some flaws that the Mass. Department of Public Health has acknowledged — that they're slow in investigating a lot of these things. And they're blaming a lack of staffing.

And what this task force is really about is looking into the financing of nursing homes, which has been a problem spot across Massachusetts and really across the country for a while now.

And lawmakers recognized this when they were debating the current fiscal 2020 budget over the past year. They put an additional $50 million into a fundto help boost nursing home finances. And they set up this task force, which gets started on its work this week, to begin looking at what is driving the financial problems at nursing homes, and what can the state do to put them on a better financial footing.

They have a February 1 date to report back to the legislature on recommendations and steps they could take to kind of improve the finances of nursing homes, and make sure that they have the money and are able to care for seniors the way people want them to.

Carrie Healy, NEPR: Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin, the top elections official in the state, spoke up for a major reform of the primary election system. He supports allowing the top two candidates to advance, regardless of party. Now, that wouldn't affect federal election ballots.

What's interesting to me is that Galvin's brother pushed for this measureon a ballot question that failed to qualify. Matt, is anyone calling into question the ethics of Galvin's move?

Not yet, exactly. My colleague Chris Lasinski stumbled across this as he was doing some reporting on these ballot questions, and Secretary Galvin doing the speaking for his brother, so to speak, and really stepping up and endorsing this ballot question that the attorney general kind of knocked off the ballot, at least for now.

But, interestingly, Secretary Galvin backing this — what is sometimes called a "blanket primary" or "jungle primary." It's used in California. He's also backed other reforms, including ranked-choice voting, which would also dramatically, though, differently, alter the way elections happen in Massachusetts.

So, I mean, it's possible it could be seen as keeping within his role as the overseer of elections. He does back a lot of election reforms in his official capacity, and this is just another way of getting at it, either through the legislature or through the ballot process.

Massachusetts Senate Republicans are urging a Democratic-controlled conference committee that's been privately discussing distracted driving legislation to resume negotiations. This is the hands-free driving bill.

In a letter, five of the Senate's six Republican senators asked the group to reconvene as soon as possible and advance the legislation. What's it likely to take to push this negotiation forward?

Yeah, really interesting to have them call for this group to reconvene. We were told when this compromise between the House and Senate appeared on the verge of getting done in late July, that it kind of fell apart in the final hours before the summer recess. And we were told that this would continue to be a subject of discussion.

The suggestion that they have not been meeting is an interesting one. Both Speaker DeLeo and Senate President Spilka on Monday, when asked by reporters, talked about how this remained a top priority for them.

But, you know, they fell back on that cliche that "the devil is in the details," and they're continuing to try and work out some of the nuanced policy pieces in this bill, even though everyone is agreed that people should put down their phones while they're driving.

So, it'll be interesting to see if letters like these, and the fact that the legislature is back from their August break now, kind of jump-start these talks. People would like to see some action and some resolution to this issue soon.

Carrie Healy hosts the local broadcast of "Morning Edition" at NEPM. She also hosts the station’s weekly government and politics segment “Beacon Hill In 5” for broadcast radio and podcast syndication.
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