Photo by Annabel Podevyn
As Americans age, we deserve the peace of mind that we can find nursing care for our parents or ourselves when we need it. But for private equity firms, that need isn’t a mission to fulfill — it’s an opportunity to profit at our expense.
As private equity takes over more nursing care, studies show higher mortality rates, reduced staffing, and increased costs as a result. But seniors are fighting back.
I live in Lincoln County, Wisconsin. For generations, our public nursing home — Pine Crest — has served our seniors. “Pine Crest is there for us when we need it. It’s worked that way for 70 years,” said retired accountant and Pine Crest Nursing Home volunteer Eileen Guthrie.
Eileen and I were among the concerned locals who tirelessly fought to keep our five-star-rated home in public hands when the county board put it up for sale to the highest bidder. Few wanted to privatize our beloved county-owned institution, which always treated residents with love and respect. Privatizing it would turn us into expendable cogs in the wheel for greater profits.
Despite broad public opposition, the county board sold Pine Crest to a subsidiary of the Ensign Group, a for-profit company. Almost immediately, the harm started. Less than a month after the sale, state regulators cited the nursing home for neglecting a patient’s medication needs, sending that person to the hospital, and reducing the necessary staff.
Since 2016, there have been 125 publicly-owned nursing home sales to private companies in Wisconsin. In nearly half of these, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) quality ratings declined after the sale.
That tracks with what communities have seen nationally.
The Center for Medicare Advocacy has found that “promised cost savings rarely materialized” when communities privatized public nursing homes, “while accountability and public oversight were significantly reduced,” the Daily Yonder reported. And the Kaiser Family Foundation has found that privatized nursing homes nationwide tend to have lower-quality ratings than those that are publicly owned.
Today about 70 percent of nursing homes are for-profit. Corporate chains own 60 percent of these, with private equity owning 11 percent and rising. This is a disservice to our aging population and to our communities — and recent legislation could make it worse.
The GOP’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” cut $1 trillion from Medicaid to finance tax cuts for the wealthy, putting more than 300 rural hospitals at “immediate risk” of closing. The bill’s limitations on hospital provider taxes further reduce critical Medicaid financing, threatening nursing care and long-term care as well.
Medicaid’s Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) program, which seniors and people with disabilities rely on, faces acute threats. States grappling with the historic Medicaid cuts will see optional HCBS funding as the first place to cut spending. Cuts in federal matching grants further reduce funding.
The privatization of Pine Crest and these tragic Medicaid cuts are part of the same story. Our communities have built public, quality institutions over decades, operating on thin margins so that our people are the priority. But now that tax cuts for the rich and windfalls for private corporations are taking priority over care, we’re the ones left holding the bag.
While our community didn’t stop the sale in the end, we did raise awareness about the need to put people over profit. I even ran for and won a seat on the Lincoln County Board so I could more directly push the board to represent people, not corporate power.
If enough of us do this in our communities, we may just save millions of lives. When we fight together, we win.
