SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO.com) — South Dakota lawmakers could provide a boost to the state’s nursing homes and long-term care facilities at next week’s special session.
Legislators recommended providing long-term and community-based care facilities with about $150 million from the roughly $600 million in unspent federal relief funs the state is tasked with distributing.
Mark Deak, Executive Director of the South Dakota Health Care Association, called the current situation “the perfect storm” in an appearance with the Interim Joint Appropriations Committee.
“You have COVID’s extraordinary expenses on top of one of the largest Medicaid reimbursement gaps in the country here in South Dakota,” Deak said. “This is a crushing weight on South Dakota long-term caregivers and in fact makes closures a real possibility.”
Deak said some federal funding earlier in the pandemic helped soften the blow, but “there’s still much more to do in mitigating COVID in our facilities, and additional federal funding is far from certain at this point.”
Legislators will decide next week how to spend the remaining COVID-19 aid. The proposed uses range from helping small businesses to funding acute care in hospitals to housing assistance. Governor Kristi Noem may have her own proposals.
(Jerry Oster, WNAX, and Mark Russo, KELO.com News, contributed to this report.)
