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Committee advances SB 250 to add skilled nursing facilities to DHCS provider directory
Summary
The Assembly Health Committee advanced SB 250 to require the Department of Health Care Services to list skilled nursing facilities in its managed‑care provider directory for Medi‑Cal beneficiaries.
The Assembly Health Committee advanced SB 250, a bill that would require the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) to include skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) in the managed‑care provider directory used by Medi‑Cal beneficiaries.
Author Senator (listed in the hearing as) Achoa Bo told the committee that nearly 723,000 seniors and people with disabilities are Medi‑Cal eligible and that navigating long‑term care placement is often urgent and confusing. Maura Gibney, executive director of the California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform (CANR), testified as a sponsor and described callers seeking help when hospitals press families to accept a nursing‑home placement in a short time frame. She said Medi‑Cal managed‑care plans cover more than 60% of nursing‑home residents in California, plans contract with a limited set of facilities, and beneficiaries currently must contact plans or facilities directly to confirm contracting.
Supporters said adding SNFs to the DHCS directory would display which plans accept which facilities in a single, searchable place and would reduce the burden on families, particularly during medical emergencies. The witness testimony included examples: a woman seeking placement for her husband was pressured into accepting a placement an hour from home after being told she would have to call each plan or nursing home to determine if they contracted together. The witness also described obstacles such as plan directories buried on websites or provided as multi‑hundred page PDFs.
During committee debate, members from both parties described personal experience helping constituents and family members navigate nursing‑home placement and praised the bill as a practical, low‑cost fix to a common problem. The bill’s author asked the committee for an I vote. The clerk called the roll and the motion was recorded as due passed to appropriations. The transcript records ayes in the roll call; the hearing record provided does not show a single consolidated numeric tally in the excerpt, so an exact count is not specified here.
SB 250 now proceeds to the committee shown on the hearing calendar for further consideration and implementation details on how DHCS will display SNF information and integrate plan‑level contracting data.
