Why the Federal SNF Staffing Mandate Missed the Mark

By Marc Zimmet

Staffing levels in nursing homes is a subject in the headlines this week after The New York Times published an article on Jan. 27 questioning whether industry lobbying and fundraising for President Trump played a role in the administration killing off a Biden-era federal staffing mandate. Mark Parkinson answered back a definitive no on that question in Park Place Live (read at myzPAX ). Here, I discuss why the skilled nursing sector was and is against a federal staffing mandate. It’s not politics. It’s common sense, based on the reality of caring for our nation’s seniors.

The skilled nursing facility (SNF) industry did not oppose the federal staffing mandate because it disputed the relationship between direct care staffing and quality, nor to protect profits by limiting labor costs. Opposition arose because the mandate was built on assumptions that do not reflect how nursing facilities operate, how they are paid, or how care is delivered across vastly different provider profiles. Staffing matters. Direct care must be sufficient to meet resident needs, and staffing stability is strongly associated with quality. But a single national staffing threshold - applied uniformly across all nursing facilities - was an imprecise solution to a complex and heterogeneous system.

Staffing and Quality: A Non-Linear Relationship

Research consistently shows that very low staffing levels are associated with poor outcomes, and that increasing staffing in those settings can improve quality. This point is widely accepted. What the research does not establish is a single optimal staffing level that applies to all nursing facilities regardless of resident acuity, turnover, or service mix. Nursing facilities care for populations with widely varying clinical needs, and staffing requirements can change daily based on admissions, discharges, and resident complexity. Once staffing meets resident needs, the marginal benefit of additional hours becomes uncertain and highly context-dependent.

“SNF” is an Overly Broad Classification

Public understanding of nursing facilities is shaped by a narrow mental model. In practice, the category encompasses providers that differ substantially in size, function, and clinical intensity. A small rural long-term care facility bears little resemblance to a short-term post-acute rehabilitation provider, or to a large complex offering ventilator care or other specialized services. Yet, under federal Medicare policy, these providers are largely treated as the same provider type and would have been subject to the same staffing mandate. This lack of differentiation is the core structural problem.

SNF-Economics

SNFs do not have pricing discretion. Medicare rates are set administratively. Medicaid rates are set by states, often using historical cost bases. Private payers increasingly benchmark below public rates. As a result, two facilities with similar staffing costs may receive materially different reimbursement due to legacy rate formulas, geographic adjustments, or state-specific methodologies that may not reflect current labor markets. Providers generally lack mechanisms to adjust revenue in response to mandated cost increases.

The staffing mandate increased labor requirements without adjusting payment systems. For many facilities, compliance would have been financially infeasible.

Facility Profile, Scale, and Structural Reality

SNFs carry high fixed costs related to staffing, regulatory compliance, and physical plant requirements. Below a certain scale, these costs are difficult to absorb without external support. Facilities with fewer than approximately 40–50 certified beds are statistically more likely to rely on hospital affiliation, campus integration, or cross-subsidization from other licensed services. A uniform staffing mandate would have disproportionately affected these facilities, many of which operate in areas with limited alternative care options.

At the other end of the spectrum, very large facilities often operate multiple discrete units serving populations with sharply different acuity levels. These internal differences are clinically meaningful but are not reflected in facility-level averages used for compliance measurement.

State-licensed specialty units further complicate facility-wide staffing metrics. Units such as ventilator programs or dialysis-capable units require substantially higher staffing and are typically reimbursed at higher Medicaid rates. Other units within the same facility may appropriately operate at much lower staffing levels. Facility-wide averages can therefore obscure understaffing in some units while overstating staffing adequacy in others.

The average nursing facility operates slightly over 100 beds, with facilities near that range being the most economically comparable. A targeted, phased approach - focused initially on facilities of similar scale and service mix - would likely have generated far less opposition. Instead, a single numeric standard was applied to a provider class defined by qualitative differences.

Averages Obscure How Care Is Delivered

Staffing is not uniform within a facility. Most nursing facilities operate multiple units with distinct care profiles. Staffing is already adjusted internally to reflect those differences. Evaluating compliance based on facility-wide averages ignores how care is actually delivered at the unit level and risks both false compliance and false deficiency findings.

Workforce Constraints Are Binding

The nursing shortage is widespread and varies significantly by geography. Even nursing facilities with sufficient financial resources may be unable to recruit additional licensed staff, particularly in rural or underserved areas.

Mandating staffing levels without addressing workforce supply does not increase the number of available nurses. It increases competition for a limited workforce and can destabilize staffing patterns across markets.

Likely Consequences

Some nursing facilities operate with sufficient margins to absorb higher staffing costs. Others operate efficiently with lower-acuity populations and staffing levels aligned to resident needs. A uniform mandate would have placed disproportionate pressure on the latter group. Facility closures would not have been limited to poor-quality providers and would have reduced access to care, particularly in rural and safety- net communities. Reduced access is not improved quality.

A Simple Analogy

Imagine a federal rule requiring the same number of attorneys per case for all law firms. A firm handling traffic violations and a firm handling complex class-action litigation would both fail under such a requirement. The work differs. The staffing needs differ. The economics differ. The staffing mandate made the same error.

Staffing matters. Stability matters. Effective policy requires targeting, flexibility, and alignment with clinical and economic reality - not uniform mandates applied to heterogeneous providers.

SNF profiles and staffing needs vary, as do units within the same facilities