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Brent Willett
President & CEO of the Iowa Health Care Association
Every Iowan’s priority should be to ensure that our state’s long-term care continuum of nursing homes, assisted living programs, home health agencies and life planning communities is delivering high quality care as close to home as possible. By working alongside Iowa policymakers, the Iowa Health Care Association and our member care-providers across Iowa are setting the standard for high-quality care, but we are committed to doing even better and expanding our home- and community-based care delivery system. That starts with advancing key priorities for the system in Iowa’s 2024 legislative session.
Recent and decisive legislative action by the Iowa Legislature and Governor Reynolds to increase needed funding to Iowa’s Medicaid system has helped to stabilize the post-pandemic long-term and post-acute care system in Iowa and resulted in nursing home direct care worker wage gains of more than 30% since 2019. The funding means that more than 43,000 caregivers in Iowa long-term care settings will be able to deliver more than 13 million days of round-the-clock care to more than 35,000 Iowans with complex health needs in all 99 counties.
Iowa has historically outperformed the nation in official federal care quality ratings for nursing homes, and we continue to do so today. In 2023, Iowa saw 37.1% of its nursing facilities receive Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services top overall ratings, compared to a 36.7% national average. While there is more work to be done to improve nursing home care quality even further, 2024 offers our state an opportunity to accelerate its investment in an expansion of home- and community-based care services (HCBS) through a series of policy and appropriations actions, because every Iowan should have access to quality long-term care as close to home as possible.
The Iowa Health Care Association is committed to supporting policy that will further strengthen the long-term care being provided across the state. This year, let’s start by enacting policies to equip providers with the tools they need to diversify their care delivery model further to care for people in HCBS settings. Common-sense policies to shorten Medicaid eligibility timelines for assisted living residents, remove barriers to becoming a new home health agency, allow for a payment mechanism for home health worker mileage reimbursement and align HCBS waiver and home health Medicaid rates more closely with the total cost of care are a handful policies we look forward to engaging with the Legislature on this session.
Lawmakers at the Capitol have important work to do in 2024, and laying the foundation for a more robust and accessible home- and community-based delivery system should be part of it.We hope Iowans will join us in thanking the Legislature and the governor for their past work, while keeping a focus on ways we can continue improving how we deliver care in every corner of Iowa.
Brent Willett is President and CEO of the Iowa Health Care Association (IHCA). IHCA and its affiliates and divisions, the Iowa Center for Assisted Living, Iowa Center for Home Care, Iowa Center for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care, IHCA Provider Solutions and the Iowa Health Care Foundation, serve the long-term services and supports profession as a nonprofit trade association. IHCA’s more than 1,000 member organizations span the continuum of long-term services and supports health care in Iowa. Willett can be reached at brent@iowahealthcare.org.