The Biden administration is mandating that staff working at healthcare facilities participating in the Medicare and Medicaid programs be vaccinated against Covid-19.
Last month, the administration announced it was developing an emergency regulation requiring staff vaccinations within the more than 15,000 Medicare-and Medicaid-participating nursing homes across the country.
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Now, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are expanding the emergency regulation to include hospitals, dialysis facilities, ambulatory surgical settings and home health agencies, among others. Staff vaccination will be required as a condition for participating in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
CMS is developing an interim final rule that will be issued in October.
The announcement is part of a larger push that the Biden administration is making to curb rising Covid-19 cases. The United States is averaging more than 150,000 new Covid-19 cases a day and about 1,500 deaths, according to data from The New York Times. This is the highest number of deaths per day since last March.
In a speech on Thursday, President Joe Biden announced that the Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees to ensure their workforces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week.
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“The bottom line: We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers,” he said, according to a transcript of the speech. “We’re going to reduce the spread of Covid-19 by increasing the share of the workforce that is vaccinated in businesses all across America.”
In the same speech, Biden announced his administration’s plans for mandating healthcare worker vaccinations.
“If you’re seeking care at a health facility, you should be able to know that the people treating you are vaccinated. Simple. Straightforward. Period,” he said.
The healthcare industry has not escaped the anti-vaccination sentiment gripping large swaths of Americans. Prior to the federal mandate, health systems had to take matters into their own hands. As of Thursday, at least 172 health systems had made Covid-19 vaccination a condition of employment, despite facing legal pushback and protests.
But there remain outliers. Nashville, Tennessee-based HCA Healthcare, one of the largest healthcare organizations in the country has not yet mandated the vaccine for its staff, the system’s CFO Bill Rutherford said during the Morgan Stanley healthcare conference on Thursday, according to Axios.
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