So if you were expecting the schoolyard bully to clobber you after classes and he didn’t show up, should you be happy? Or would it just kick your anxiety into higher gear in anticipation of when the haymakers would start landing?

Nursing homes have the joy of living out that scenario today, and possibly for many more days. 

Now that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has blown a hole in its credibility, speculation can run rampant. Or more precisely, now that CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure has seen her credibility dinged, speculation can run rampant.

For it was CBL herself who said that her agency would release the nation’s first ever nursing home staffing mandate sometime “this spring.” She proudly doubled down early last month by telling the Washington Post how much she likes to keep her deadlines. 

As your 2023 calendar now indicates, spring officially has come and gone. 

Yea?

For nursing home operators, this might be considered cruel and unusual punishment. They’ve been dreading the execution of the staffing mandate for well over a year now.

That’s true except for the more optimistic among us, not that the skilled nursing field is known for its overabundance of optimistic individuals. But those people who are hoping for the best still might get it. It’s OK to let your imagination run wild and wonder why the staffing mandate proposal has  remained at the Office of Management and Budget. It’s spent nowhere near a record time span there, but clearly this has not gone as smoothly as the White House first envisioned.

One way or another, credit must be given where credit is due. The nursing home lobby has done a more than credible job pointing out how absurd it would be to mandate that an industry still down 200,000 nurses and other workers would suddenly be able to conjure up thousands more caregivers just because federal regulators start demanding it.

The CMS leader’s credibility and providers’ nerves are both in tatters as of this writing. In all likelihood, the former will eventually get shrugged off and the latter will become validated when a rule is released in the near future.

Until then, however, I recommend pursuing census and staffing recovery, and quality care activities, as you normally would. And as if nothing were going to happen on the staffing mandate front. 

Something will eventually come of it, but worrying about it already has ruined a lot of people’s springs. No sense letting it trash the summer, too. A time for ire, albeit now tardy, will come soon enough, along with more questioning of CMS’s credibility, says the smart money.

James M. Berklan is McKnight’s Executive Editor.

Opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News columns are not necessarily those of McKnight’s.