Sen. Ron Wyden, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is calling on the Biden administration to use existing authority to beef up regulations on residential treatment facilities that care for vulnerable youth.

The lawmaker did so via a Sept. 3 letter addressed to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Administration for Children and Families (ACF). The letter is a follow-up to previous action Wyden has taken on this issue.

In June, the Senate Finance Committee released a report that accumulated several years worth of misdeeds and wrongdoings by organizations that operate residential treatment facilities. The highly critical report did not come with legislation.

Legislation on residential treatment facilities has yet to be filed, according to a Behavioral Health Business review of new bills.

Specifically, Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, is pushing CMS and ACF to get an update on the agencies’ work on residential treatment facilities that are for children.

CMS oversees the Medicaid program, which covers vulnerable children in partnership with state governments. ACF oversees several initiatives related to child and family welfare, including the nation’s foster care system.

“I realize there are children whose needs are best served by residential care, but, in too many

instances, children are not receiving that level of care nor an acceptable caliber of care in RTFs,” Wyden wrote in letters sent to each agency and released to the public.

He added that he is “hard at work drafting legislation” that increases investment in community-based care as well as increases oversight and the care standards of these care settings.

The letters also call on CMS and ACF to coordinate rules for spending on behavioral health care that is based in community settings as an alternative to residential treatment centers, streamline federal oversight and collaborate to center the lived experiences of youth impacted by these programs in their reforms.

Behavioral health advocates said the Senate Finance Committee’s report was largely unproductive.

“This will not move things forward because it is so partisan and so biased,” one advocate previously told Behavioral Health Business.

Other federal efforts lend some credibility to the idea that the residential treatment facility industry is often poorly overseen by state governments.

The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General in a report found that one-third of states do not collect data that could reveal maltreatment in residential treatment facilities. The remainder often did not indicate that data was monitored for potential abuse, the report stated.

Executives with Acadia Healthcare Co. Inc. (Nasdaq: ACHC) and Universal Health Services (NYSE: UHS) largely dismissed the Senate Finance Committee. Both are two of the largest behavioral health facility operators in the U.S. and subjects named in the report. 

“We have seen virtually no impact from the Senate hearing and report,” UHS CFO Steve Filton said on the company’s latest earnings call.