Advocates for nursing home residents are livid after the Illinois House unanimously approved a bill that apparently would make it harder for the state to cite and fine homes after a resident has been injured or killed.

One advocate said House Bill 5849, sponsored by Rep. David Leitch, R-Peoria, would roll back much of the state’s 2010 landmark nursing home reform law and put more residents at risk.

“This is how nursing home reform dies,” said Wendy Meltzer, director of Chicago-based Illinois Citizens for Better Care. “Nursing home reform doesn’t die in a big, splashy way, where everybody pays attention and you go, ‘Oh my God, what a big thing that was.’ Nursing home reform dies quietly and on the edges by making it bureaucratically impossible to implement nursing home reform, and that’s what this is.”

Read more about the bill and the surrounding controversy here.

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