A California law allowing nursing homes to make medical decisions on behalf of certain mentally incompetent residents is unconstitutional, a state court ruled this week.

The law, which has been in effect more than 20 years, gave nursing homes authority to decide residents’ medical treatment if a doctor determined they were unable to do so and they had no one to represent them.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Evelio M. Grillo wrote in the June 24 decision that the law violates patients’ due process rights because it doesn’t require nursing homes to notify patients they have been deemed incapacitated or to give them the chance to object.

Grillo acknowledged the decision is likely to “create problems” in how nursing home operate but wrote that patients’ rights are more compelling.

“The stakes are simply too high to hold otherwise,” the judge wrote. Any error could deprive patients of their rights to make medical decisions that “may result in significant consequences, including death.”

The fact that nursing homes are making end-of-life decisions without patient input is a big concern, according to the ruling. The decision cited one nursing home resident who was found to be mentally incapacitated and who had no representative. The facility staff made a decision to take him off life-sustaining treatment and he passed away in 2013.

The ruling came after the California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, an advocacy group, filed a lawsuit in 2013 against the state Department of Public Health. The suit alleged that nursing homes used the law to administer anti-psychotic drugs, place residents in physical restraints and deny patients life-sustaining treatment.

Tony Chicotel, a staff attorney for the group, said the ruling will dramatically impact the lives of the most vulnerable nursing home residents.

“What [nursing homes] used to do was routinely make decisions big and small for their residents without really any regard to due process,” Chicotel said. “Now the residents are finally going to have their rights acknowledged and honored.”

Even patients who are compromised should still have a say in their medical care, he added.

“They have been ignored,” he said. “Unrepresented residents and the way they are treated in nursing homes has never been a priority of the Department of Public Health.”

The department is reviewing the decision, a spokesman said. Department officials declined to comment further or say whether they planned to appeal.

The law was enacted in 1992 because nursing facilities needed a way to give medical treatment to their incapacitated residents without having to wait up to six months for state approval, according to the ruling.

But the decision could make it challenging for nursing homes to provide routine medical care or to offer hospice care to residents who lack the mental capacity to make their own decisions and have no designated representatives, said Mark Reagan, an attorney representing the trade group, California Association of Health Facilities, which is not part of the lawsuit.

“If the person objects, then what?” Reagan said. “That can put patients and facilities in a difficult place.”

And seeking court approval to provide anti-psychotic medication to residents who truly need it would be costly and time-consuming for nursing facilities, he said. “How do you keep that person safe and how do you keep the other residents of the skilled nursing facility safe?” he said.

Reagan believes the ruling could have an unanticipated outcome: Patients without decision-makers could have a hard time finding a nursing facility willing to take them.

“If this decision makes it more difficult to supply necessary care at the bedside, this population is going to be less served,” he said.

The judge, however, wrote that informing patients and allowing them to object is not likely to result in any significant burdens on nursing homes.

agorman@kff.org

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

If the physician networks for plans sold on the health law’s online insurance exchanges were T-shirts, more than 40 percent would be size X-small or small. That’s the takeaway from a new study that analyzed nearly 400 physician networks in silver-level plans sold around the country  in 2014.

The study labeled 11 percent of plans “extra small” because they covered fewer than 10 percent of physicians in a plan’s region. Another 30 percent were “small,” meaning they covered between 10 and 25 percent of physicians. Just 11 percent of plans were classified as “extra large” because they covered at least 60 percent of physicians in the area.

As consumers shop for coverage on the exchanges, knowing the trade-off between premium price and network size could be important to some, says Kathy Hempstead, director of the coverage team at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which funded the study.

“People don’t have a good way to understand what they’re buying,” Hempstead says. “I think we need to frontload more consumer information, and what your network is like is important.”

Plan type isn’t a good indicator of network size, according to the study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard David Institute of Health Economics. Eighty percent of the plans offered on the marketplaces were either preferred provider organizations or health maintenance organizations. Yet even though HMOs typically don’t cover any out-of-network providers, more than half of HMO physician networks were either small or very small. By contrast, only a quarter of PPOs, which typically cover providers who are outside the plan’s network, had physician networks that were classified as either small or very small.

Under the health law, health plans have to “maintain a network that is sufficient in number and types of providers … to assure that all services will be accessible to enrollees without unreasonable delay.”

Previously, the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. analyzed narrow networks based on the proportion of hospitals that participated in a plan’s service area. This is the first study to examine physician participation in exchange plan networks, Hempstead says.

“If you’re going to be in a direct-to-consumer market you have to be ready for these issues,” she says.

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Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

In its first five years, the Affordable Care Act has survived technical meltdowns, a presidential election, two Supreme Court challenges — including one resolved Thursday — and dozens of repeal efforts in Congress. But its long-term future still isn’t ensured. Here are five of the biggest hurdles left for the law:

Medicaid Expansion. About 4 million more Americans would gain coverage if all states expand the state-federal Medicaid programs to cover people with incomes at or slightly above the poverty line. Twenty-one states with Republican governors or GOP-controlled legislatures, including Texas and Florida, have balked, citing ideological objections, their own budget pressures, as well as skepticism about Washington’s long-term commitment to pay for most of the costs.

Anemic Enrollment. Eighteen million Americans who are eligible to buy insurance in federal and state marketplaces haven’t purchased it. Those marketplaces have had particular trouble enrolling Hispanics, young adults and people who object to being told to buy insurance.  Federal funding used by state marketplaces to enroll people and advertise is drying up. Many state marketplaces haven’t figured out how to be self-sustaining. Vermont, Hawaii, Colorado and Rhode Island are among those states searching for more money. The penalty for going without coverage rises next year to $695 per adult or 2.5 percent of family income—whichever is larger.

Market Stability. Nationally, premiums haven’t gone up too much on average in the first two years of the marketplaces, but that could change. The federal government has been protecting insurers from unexpectedly high medical bills, but that cushion disappears after next year. At the same time, insurers finally have enough experience with their initial customers to figure out if their premiums are sufficient to cover medical costs. If they’re not, expect increases.

Affordability. People who get their insurance through their employer have mostly been spared jolts from the health law. But the federal government begins taxing expensive health plans in 2018. The “Cadillac tax,” created by the health law, will pressure employers to offer skimpier health coverage or pass the taxes’ cost on to their employees. Also, individuals buying their insurance on the health law marketplaces continue to risk large out-of-pocket costs if they need lots of care. Their maximum financial obligations for next year are $6,850 for individuals and $13,700 for families. Those who choose to go out of their insurance network may have no ceiling on how much they may have to pay.

Political Resistance. Thursday’s ruling did little to diminish the GOP’s zeal to repeal the health law. Republicans on both sides of the Capitol pledged to continue their efforts to kill the ACA. A lawsuit filed by House Republicans last year alleges the president overstepped his authority when implementing the health law. The topic remains grist for the 2016 presidential campaign, with several Republican presidential candidates – including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — reiterating their desire to repeal the law. If the Republicans capture both the White House and Congress in 2016, all bets are off over whether the law survives intact.

Kaiser Health News writers Julie Appleby, Mary Agnes Carey, Phil Galewitz and Jordan Rau contributed to this report.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.