WASHINGTON — A new report from the AARP Public Policy Institute puts a number to something most families already feel in their bones: the unpaid labor holding America’s long-term care system together is now worth more than $1 trillion a year. The report, “Valuing the Invaluable 2026,” found that 59 million Americans who care for adult family members, neighbors, or friends provided 49.5 billion hours of care in 2024 — work valued at $1.01 trillion annually. That’s the equivalent of about 23.8 million full-time workers, or roughly 17% of the entire U.S. full-time workforce. To put it in context: that…
Author: Chaya S
Harrisburg, PA – At 3:17 a.m., the lights are still on at the nurse’s station. A tired RN flips through medication charts while two aides hurry down the hallway to answer call lights. One resident needs help getting to the bathroom. Another is confused and calling out for her husband, unaware he died years ago. Down the corridor, a frail man struggles to breathe as an oxygen machine hums beside his bed. This is not a rare scene. It is the nightly reality inside nursing homes across Pennsylvania — buildings filled with medically fragile seniors, overworked caregivers, and administrators trying…
New York, New York — Dozens of home care workers settled in outside New York City Hall on Wednesday for an open-ended sit-in, demanding that Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the City Council pass legislation that would ban 24-hour work shifts — a practice workers say has battered their bodies and stolen years of their lives. The protest marked the latest escalation in a fight that has stretched more than a decade. Under current state rules, home care workers can be assigned to 24-hour shifts but are compensated for just 13 of those hours — as long as employers document three…
Washington, D.C. — Nursing homes and long-term care facilities across the country are quietly absorbing a staffing hit that has nothing to do with wages or burnout. It’s driven by immigration policy — and industry leaders warn the damage is accelerating. Immigrants make up roughly 28% of the direct care workforce in long-term care, totaling more than 820,000 workers, according to a KFF analysis of federal survey data. That includes about 21% of nursing facility workers, nearly a third of home care aides and more than 30% of housekeeping and maintenance staff in nursing homes. Recent federal policy changes have…
Richmond, Virginia — For years, Virginia’s nursing home residents and their families had little way of knowing who was really taking over a facility — or whether the new owners had a track record worth trusting. That’s about to change. The Virginia legislature has unanimously passed a bill requiring the state Department of Health to review all nursing home ownership transfers before they’re finalized. The measure now sits on the desk of Governor Abigail Spanberger, who has until April 13 to sign it into law. The bills — carried by Senator Barbara Favola and Delegate Rodney Willett — passed both…
If you want to understand how nursing home oversight actually works in America, the numbers that came out of Washington this week tell a pretty stark story. The Long Term Care Community Coalition published two new enforcement data reports on March 13, drawing on federal CMS data covering roughly three years of oversight activity across the country’s nearly 15,000 nursing facilities. What the numbers show is a system that generates an enormous volume of citations — and issues actual fines in only a small fraction of cases. Total deficiencies over the three-year period: 419,400. Of those, 23,830 — about 5.7%…
Salt Lake City, Utah — When Jason Murray took the stage Tuesday to address investors, he didn’t sugarcoat what the past year has been for PACS Group. He called it, plainly, a “time of crisis.” But the CEO of the Utah-based nursing home giant — which now operates 323 facilities across 17 states — came with a message: the company that navigated a federal billing investigation and an internal audit that stretched more than a year is not the same company that entered that storm. “We’re a different organization,” Murray told investors during the company’s 2026 outlook update, according to…
Mineola, New York — A nursing home resident’s oxygen tank ran empty. She begged a nearby nurse for air. The nurse decided she was exaggerating — a panic attack, she was told — and ordered Xanax. A supervisor caught the empty tank moments later and replaced it. The resident survived. The facility paid a $154,000 federal fine, the largest single penalty issued to a Long Island nursing home in 2025. That case is among 18 citations issued to Long Island nursing homes last year for serious health and safety violations — including multiple allegations of physical and sexual abuse —…
Washington, D.C. — After more than four years of watching from the sidelines, federal regulators are finally moving. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has announced it’s actively issuing the first formal enforcement notices for “information blocking” — the practice of restricting patient access to electronic health information — and the compliance window for healthcare providers, including nursing facilities, is now officially closed. What just happened At a national health IT gathering last week, the HHS Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy confirmed that the agency is issuing notices of investigation to health IT developers — the first formal…
Windsor Locks, Connecticut — State regulators have ordered a Connecticut nursing home to close after an Alzheimer’s patient wandered outside in the middle of the night and died in the cold — and a state investigation found the facility failed her at almost every turn. The Connecticut Department of Social Services issued the closure order against Bickford Health Care Center in Windsor Locks this week, requiring all 36 residents to be transferred to other facilities by April 10. The move comes after Margaret “Peggy” Healey, 93, left the building undetected in the early morning hours of February 8 and spent…
