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CMS will not immediately remove nursing homes from Medicaid and Medicare if they do not adhere to the employee staff vaccination requirement announced last week, administrators said during a call with industry stakeholders on Wednesday. Instead, CMS will take a stepwise approach to enforcing the mandate. Nursing homes will first be notified they are not in compliance with the regulation, then assessed civil monetary penalties, then denied payment, and ultimately removed from the program if they do not comply. (Christ, 8/25)

Nebraska's veterans affairs agency is facing questions from a state lawmaker after it published job advertisements for nurses touting the fact that the state doesn't require its employees to get coronavirus vaccinations. The ads on a state jobs website prominently note the lack of vaccination requirements for state employees, right after mentioning a $5,000 hiring bonus. In a separate mail advertisement, the state lists "No mandated COVID-19 vaccination" as one of the "many great benefits" of its nursing jobs. (8/25)

Nursing homes have a long-term care problem: 18 months after the Covid-19 crisis began, their staffs are still shrinking. While employment in nearly every occupation has been recovering from the shock of the pandemic, the number of people working in nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities has continued to drop, according to federal data. (Weber, 8/25)

Gov. Kathy Hochul, in one of her first acts as the new leader of New York, overhauled how the state releases Covid-19 death data to ensure that it is more consistent with federal reporting standards — an issue that dogged former Gov. Andrew Cuomo administration and sparked allegations of a coverup. The Hochul administration’s first Covid-19 update released Tuesday recognized an additional 12,000 Covid deaths that had been previously excluded from the state’s official tally. It showed both the deaths that health care facilities report through the state’s Health Electronic Response Data System — a total of 43,415 — as well as those reported to and compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a total of 55,395. (Young, 8/25)

New Yorkers, many of whom were still grieving, were not thrilled with Gov. Kathy Hochul's, D., answer Wednesday regarding how she plans to investigate last year's COVID-19 nursing home tragedy and the Cuomo administration's reported cover-up. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D., was condemned for enforcing a mandate that forced COVID patients into nursing homes last year, which critics alleged led to the staggering death toll in those facilities, and reports later revealed his administration blocked the release of the true death toll. Hochul was asked what she would do to get to the bottom of the sweeping tragedy. (O'Brien, 8/25)

During a Wednesday interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) — at that point on the job for less than 40 hours — announced that her state was going to provide a more accurate accounting of fatalities related to covid-19 moving forward. “We’re now releasing more data than had been released before publicly, so people know the nursing home deaths and the hospital deaths are consistent with what’s being displayed by the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention],” Hochul said. “There’s a lot of things that weren’t happening, and I’m going to make them happen. Transparency will be the hallmark of my administration.” (Bump, 8/25)