Practical writing for families choosing, checking and paying for long-term care, grounded in the same federal data as the rest of this site.
Choosing a home
Start with two things you can look up before you talk to anyone: the CMS star rating for quality of patient care, and the patient survey results. Those two numbers tell you more about what it is actually like to be a pat...
Jul 12, 2026 · 13 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
Safety & rights
Most falls in a nursing home are not negligence, and the ones that are rarely look dramatic. A frail 88-year-old with Parkinson's who tries to stand without her walker and goes down is not a scandal. A home that wrote "a...
Jul 12, 2026 · 16 min read
Paying for care
The Medicaid look-back period is a five-year window, in most states, during which every asset your parent gave away gets examined before Medicaid will pay for long-term care. Transfers made in that window for less than f...
Jul 12, 2026 · 15 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
Paying for care
There is no national number. Not a reliable one. Private-pay nursing home rates are not published in any federal dataset, which means any site that hands you a single average is either working from a survey nobody can au...
Jul 10, 2026 · 13 min read
Choosing a home
A skilled nursing facility is the Medicare term for a short-term rehabilitation stay after a hospital admission. A nursing home is the everyday term for long-term custodial care. Most of the time it is the same building,...
Jul 10, 2026 · 17 min read
Planning ahead
Distance does not disqualify you from being the most useful person on your parent's care team. It disqualifies you from one job, the job of being the local eyes and hands, and it leaves every other job open. The families...
Jul 9, 2026 · 15 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