The Nation : Nursing Home Patient Rule Challenged

Two nursing home associations filed suit to block a federal rule they said could result in discharging and leaving homeless more than 200,000 mentally ill and retarded patients from nursing homes. The American Assn. of Homes for the Aging and the American Health Care Assn. filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the Department of Health and Human Services and Secretary Louis W. Sullivan. It asks the court to halt implementation of a portion of the budget legislation of 1987 requiring all nursing homes to begin refusing admission to mentally ill or mentally retarded patients and to discharge such patients living at the facility less than 30 months. The nursing homes were ordered to complete screening of their patients by April, 1990, and violators were threatened with losing federal funding. The law was aimed at ending so-called “warehousing� of mentally ill and retarded people.