Editorial: Speaking of taxes …

Friday, Dec. 27, 2002 | 11:20 a.m.

We couldn't have said it any better than Charles Perry when we heard that Nevada's nursing home industry is asking for a 6 percent tax on itself over and above whatever gross receipts tax is approved by the 2003 Legislature. "This is a helluva way to run a railroad," said Perry, executive director of the Nevada Health Care Association. It's one thing for a business not to protest a new tax on itself -- but to ask for one?

But the industry has done the math and has discovered that the additional state tax, under the formula for receiving federal matching funds, would actually boost revenues by more than $6 million a year. Unfortunately it's come to this -- governments and industries supported by government money must play games with each other in order to survive. It's either this, as 23 other states have also discovered, or keep losing nursing homes to bankruptcies. While John D. Rockefeller would be proud of this gamesmanship, it's worth noting that his tactics resulted in a trainload of federal reforms. Sounds to us like it's time for reforming the federal reimbursement rates for Medicaid and Medicare, so the health care industry, including nursing homes, can doctor its clients and not its numbers.