This week Texas sued the Biden administration to try to block new federal minimum staffing requirements for nursing homes.

The new rules could eventually require facilities that get money for Medicare to hire tens of thousands of nurses and AIDS.

Ali Rogin looks into this controversial mandate.

The nursing home rule announced in April phases in staffing requirements, including that a registered nurse be on site 24 hours a day

and that each resident get a minimum number of hours of direct care each day.

But like many industries around the country, these facilities are

grappling with staffing shortages.

We spoke to one nursing home worker who's been on the front lines of care for 34 years.

Not everybody's teeth get brushed every day.

People's nails aren't cut like they used to.

Beds aren't being made.

Staff has to take shortcuts to get things done because there's less of them to provide all those,

all the care that the residents need. The system is so broken and so short-handed and so difficult to manage with the different combinations of patients that you're not able to provide

the care for the people that really need it at the moments they really need it.

The new role faces pushback from the nursing home industry for need it

really need it. The new role faces pushback from the nursing home industry for being unrealistic

and from patient advocates who say it doesn't go far enough.

Jordan Rao is a senior correspondent at KFF News and has covered nursing homes for more than a decade.

Jordan, thank you so much for being here.

Why did the Biden administration want to put this role in place?

Well, the pandemic really exposed the degree to which nursing homes were in dire straits. I mean over

200,000 people died in them just from COVID alone and that put a lot of pressure on it.

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