Washington, D.C. — For families who lost loved ones in New York nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic, Monday brought another painful ending to a years-long legal fight. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a wrongful death lawsuit targeting former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration and the Greater New York Hospital Association over a March 2020 directive that ordered nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients returning from hospitals. The high court’s refusal to take up the case means lower court rulings — which dismissed the suit on qualified immunity grounds — now stand. The Case Behind the Decision The lawsuit…
Author: Sarah K
Davenport, Iowa — A nursing home with a well-documented history of failing its residents is in trouble again. This time, state inspectors found 18 violations in a single visit — including an attempt to evict a resident by sending him to a homeless shelter. The Ivy at Davenport was inspected last month as part of its routine annual recertification review by the Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals and Licensing. Inspectors walked away with citations for 18 separate state and federal regulatory failures, along with $29,750 in state fines. Those penalties are currently on hold while CMS determines whether federal fines…
Little Rock, Arkansas — Doris Coulson was a retired nurse who understood, better than most, what real care looked like. She had spent her career providing it. When she became a patient herself at a nursing home owned by New Jersey businessman Joseph Schwartz, her family expected the same. What they got instead was a death that should never have happened. Staff fed Coulson solid food despite explicit medical orders prohibiting it. She died. An autopsy found scrambled eggs in her lungs. Her family sued and eventually won a judgment of nearly $19 million. That was six years ago. They’ve…
Sacramento, California — Pearlene Darby was 81 years old when she died of infections from bedsores that had eaten through her legs, hips, heels, and tailbone. Her family sued the nursing home where she’d lived, but they also named the building’s owner: a real estate investment trust that had collected more than $1 million in rent from the facility in the year she died. The story isn’t an isolated one. A new investigation by KFF Health News found that real estate investment trusts — known as REITs — now hold stakes in roughly 1 in 6 nursing homes across the…
Washington, D.C. — A new federal payment model that would hold hospitals financially accountable for every hip and knee replacement — from the operating room through 90 days of recovery — has skilled nursing operators asking a question CMS hasn’t fully answered: how much of the projected savings comes out of their revenue? The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services tucked the Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement Expanded Model, or CJR-X, into its proposed FY 2027 hospital payment rule, published in April 2026. The model would be mandatory for virtually all eligible acute-care hospitals nationwide, with Performance Year 1 set…
Baltimore, Maryland — For years, the moment a Medicare patient left the operating room and headed to a skilled nursing facility, hospitals largely washed their hands of what came next. A new federal proposal would change that — for every hospital in the country. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is proposing a mandatory, nationwide expansion of a bundled payment model for hip, knee, and ankle replacements. Under the plan, hospitals would be financially accountable for the quality and cost of care for the full 90 days after surgery — including any time spent in a skilled nursing facility,…
Hawarden, Iowa — A western Iowa nursing home is facing intense scrutiny after state inspectors found 24 regulatory violations during a March inspection — including the sexual abuse of a resident — yet walked away with a total fine of just $500. State inspectors with the Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals and Licensing descended on Hillcrest Health Care Center in Hawarden after receiving six separate complaints, all of which were confirmed. The violations they documented stretched across nearly every dimension of nursing home care: resident abuse, medication errors, infection control failures, inadequate staffing, dementia care lapses, and the facility’s own…
Baltimore, Maryland — For nursing home residents waiting days — sometimes weeks — for insurance approval to start a prescribed medication, help may be on the way. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services proposed a sweeping overhaul of how insurance plans approve prescription drugs this month, setting hard deadlines that would require decisions on urgent drug requests within 24 hours and standard requests within 72 hours. The proposed rule, released April 10, would apply across Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and plans sold through ACA marketplaces. “Patients should not have to wait days or weeks for…
Washington, D.C. — The country is on track to run short by nearly a quarter million licensed practical nurses within the next dozen years — and the facilities most exposed to that shortfall are the nation’s nursing homes. New federal workforce projections released in December 2025 by the Health Resources and Services Administration show the U.S. will have roughly 565,690 LPNs available by 2038, against an expected demand of 811,640. That’s a gap of nearly 246,000 nurses — a 30% shortage — according to data highlighted by the nation’s largest long-term care trade group. The numbers land particularly hard on…
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania — Pennsylvania’s nursing home industry is contracting in ways that aren’t making headlines, but families and hospital discharge planners are starting to feel it. A new survey from LeadingAge PA found that nursing homes across the state are quietly closing beds, cutting capacity, and turning away patients who need post-acute care — with no clear fix in sight. The January survey of 123 nursing home operators tells a stark story. About 10% permanently decommissioned beds over the past year. Nearly 30% left existing spaces unfilled. And roughly half said they’d recently had to turn away a patient referred…
