Home care and home health providers are grappling with the Supreme Court’s split decision last week over two federal COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The High Court blocked, for now, a rule requiring vaccinations or testing for workers at large, private employers. It upheld a vaccine mandate for healthcare workers at organizations receiving Medicare and Medicaid funding.
Leaders at Interim HealthCare of the Upstate, which offers personal care, home healthcare and hospice to roughly 4,000 patients throughout South Carolina, are among those trying to make sense of the ruling. CEO Charles McDonough told McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse in an email his agency has workers that fall under the CMS mandate and others who don’t.
“While we are still digesting the new rulings and what the overall impact will be, we do foresee some challenges with how to balance the application of the policy,” McDonough said. “However, we do not anticipate service disruptions for patients.”
Last Thursday, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling and upheld a mandate by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid that required an estimated 10 million healthcare workers to get vaccinated against COVID-19. CMS said it will begin enforcing the mandate on Jan. 27. However, the justices rejected a separate mandate by the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration that required workers at businesses with more than 100 employees to get vaccinated or mask up and undergo weekly testing.
Will Vail, an attorney who specializes in home care and home healthcare at Polsinelli, told McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse that despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, the cases are far from closed and face further adjudication in lower courts.
“These were just preliminary rulings to decide whether, while the Court was deciding the overall question of their enforceability, the rules should be allowed to go into effect,” Vail explained in an email. “For the OSHA rule, the answer is no. For the CMS rule, the answer is yes. But the courts may nevertheless decide that the rules either are or are not enforceable on the merits. If the courts were to so decide, then they eventually will make their way back to the Supreme Court.”
With the OSHA mandate blocked for now, private pay home care agencies will need to decide on their own if they want to mandate vaccinations for their staff — that is, if their state doesn’t already have a requirement in place. Home care firms that operate nationally could face an even more difficult challenge of navigating a patchwork of state mandates.
