On Wednesday, February 1, the South Dakota House of Representatives defeated HB 1003, a bill that would have allowed licensed nursing facilities to transfer nursing bed capacity to another facility. The Bill would have required the transferee to license the transferred or purchased beds within twenty-four (24) months of the transfer or sale.
While the Bill’s sponsor sought to add “a little bit of free enterprise” to the nursing facility industry in South Dakota, opponents of the Bill feared that the ability to freely transfer nursing bed capacity would disadvantage rural areas of South Dakota in favor of more populous areas where residents are more likely to be private-pay residents as opposed to Medicaid recipients.