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…
Author: Sarah K
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…
Washington, D.C. — A new federal grant program is quietly opening doors for nursing homes — but only those willing to back up their lifestyle care programs with hard evidence. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has launched a competitive grant program called ELEVATE — short for Enhancing Lifestyle and Evaluating Value-based Approaches Through Evidence — offering $100 million in funding to just 30 organizations nationwide. Nursing homes are eligible, but so are academic medical centers, community organizations, and multi-site senior living operators. The competition will be stiff. The Notice of Funding Opportunity was posted in March, with the…
Hawthorne, New York — A community of Catholic nuns who have spent more than a century caring for terminally ill cancer patients is now fighting to keep doing that work on their own terms. The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, along with Rosary Hill Home — their licensed skilled nursing facility in Westchester County — filed a federal lawsuit on April 6 challenging New York’s LGBTQ Long-Term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, names Gov. Kathy Hochul and leaders of the state Department of Health as…
New York, New York — The federal agency overseeing Medicare and Medicaid has admitted it used wildly inaccurate figures to justify a high-profile fraud investigation into New York’s Medicaid program — a blunder that’s now raising questions about whether the administration’s broader anti-fraud campaign is built on solid ground. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, led by Dr. Mehmet Oz, claimed last month that New York’s Medicaid program had provided personal care services to roughly 5 million people in a single year. That figure — nearly three-quarters of the state’s 6.8 million Medicaid enrollees — was central to Oz’s…
