Who owns American nursing homes, how chains and private equity operate, and why it shows up in the care.
Ownership & industry
Nursing homes run on certified nursing assistants. They do the bathing, the toileting, the transfers, the feeding help, the walking someone back to bed at 2 a.m. when they are scared. When a facility cannot keep aides on...
Oct 2, 2026 · 15 min read
Ownership & industry
The CMS 5-star rating is a single number built from three separate measures, and those three measures are not equally reliable. If you have fifteen minutes and one search to make, use it to check the inspection rating an...
Aug 13, 2026 · 13 min read
Ownership & industry
The short answer: a certified nursing home gets a full standard health inspection on a recurring cycle that is supposed to be roughly annual, but the actual gap often runs longer. On top of that, any complaint can trigge...
Aug 8, 2026 · 14 min read
Ownership & industry
The Special Focus Facility programme is the federal government's own watchlist of nursing homes with a persistent record of poor care. It is not a list of homes that failed one inspection. It is a list of homes that fail...
Aug 6, 2026 · 14 min read
Ownership & industry
A nursing home closing is not a single event. It is a process with a legal clock attached, and the residents inside it have rights that most families never get told about until the building is nearly empty. You are entit...
Aug 5, 2026 · 15 min read
Ownership & industry
Staffing is the number families can actually compare before they sign anything, and the one number that is most often misread. It is reported as hours per resident per day: total nursing hours worked in a day divided by...
Aug 5, 2026 · 17 min read
Ownership & industry
An inspection report is the closest thing you will get to a facility describing its own behavior in its own words. The problem is that CMS writes these reports in a code: letters, grid positions, and F-tags. Once you lea...
Aug 4, 2026 · 14 min read
Ownership & industry
Roughly seven in ten Medicare-certified nursing homes in this country belong to a named chain. That means when you tour a building and like the activities director, the smell of the lobby, the light in the room, you are...
Jul 22, 2026 · 13 min read
Ownership & industry
Ownership type is context, not a verdict. Research generally finds higher average staffing at non-profit nursing homes, but that is an average across thousands of facilities, and the range inside each category is wider t...
Jul 22, 2026 · 15 min read
Ownership & industry
Private equity and real estate investment trusts have bought a lot of nursing homes over the past two decades, and the peer-reviewed research on those deals has landed on a consistent finding: at the facilities studied,...
Jul 12, 2026 · 16 min read
Ownership & industry
CMS publishes a turnover figure for the nursing staff at every Medicare-certified nursing home, and the national average is 46%. Nearly half the nursing workforce at the average American nursing home turned over in a sin...
Jul 10, 2026 · 16 min read
Ownership & industry
Weekend staffing is the single most useful number most families never look at. CMS publishes weekend nursing hours separately from weekday hours, and in plenty of homes the weekend figure sits well below the weekday one....
Jul 8, 2026 · 15 min read