CMS administrator Seema Verma on effort to protect seniors in nursing homes from COVID-19
Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and member of the White House coronavirus task force, joins Martha MacCallum on 'The Story.'
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Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Seema Verma, a member of President Trump's coronavirus task force, told Fox News Monday that the administration is committed to "doing everything we can" to protect the safety of nursing home residents.
"Every life is precious, and that's what this administration started very early in making sure that we were doing everything we can to keep nursing home residents safe," Verma told "The Story." "They deserve that. Older individuals have been taking care of us their whole lives and they deserve to be respected and to be protected."
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has faced backlash for his early decision to prohibit nursing homes from rejecting patients who had tested positive for COVID-19 after they were discharged from the hospital. The policy, which has since been reversed, came under renewed scrutiny after data found an estimated 40 percent of deaths from COVID-19 have occurred in nursing homes and residential living facilities.
"When doctors and hospitals are discharging patients from hospitals, they have to make sure that we are discharging the patient to a place that can accommodate their needs," Verma said. "And if that person is still testing positive, they need to be isolated and ... [medical professionals must] make sure that isolation and care can continue in the most appropriate setting."
Nursing home directors in New York have reported begging state officials for more protective equipment and tests as well as help in relocating positive patients, but those pleas have gone unanswered. Meanwhile, the number of workers who have called out sick steadily rose.
"One of the things we did on the federal level was to increase reimbursement for testing and actually, for the first time, pay for labs to go out to nursing homes to collect samples," said Verma, who insisted that "more and more nursing homes" are now being tested.
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Earlier Monday, the CDC issued guidelines on reopening nursing homes, outlining parameters around testing, but stopped short of federally mandating them, host Martha MacCallum observed.
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Verma said the administration is open to moving "towards a requirement" if "we felt like there wasn't compliance ... but at this time we feel like the recommendation around testing is a baseline, so we not only want to test the residents, but we also want to make sure that the health care staff and that nursing facility is also tested as well."
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