Someday, most of us will return to life before COVID-19. Nursing homes will not. The deaths of more than 16,000 of their residents from COVID-19 has profoundly disrupted senior living facilities--especially nursing homes-- and will drive historic change in the industry. Robert Kramer, president of the consulting firm Nexus Insights and a long-time observer of nursing home finances, told me, [...]
Faced with growing pressures from payors, rising costs, the need to replace old buildings, increased competition from other forms of residential care, and shrinking demand from older adults who prefer to age at home, nursing homes are shutting their doors at a rapid pace. There still are more than 15,000 nursing facilities in the US—more, in fact, than McDonald’s franchises. [...]
Recent articles in the journal Health Affairs attempted to attach numbers to a problem that millions of American families are intimately aware of: Many middle-income older adults cannot afford to pay their out-of-pocket costs for health care and senior housing. And the problem is going to get worse once the Baby Boomers begin to hit their late 70s and early [...]