60 Seconds with Swett: Supreme Court Decision Hits Public SNFs
So much of the ire against skilled nursing facilities (personal, political and in the media) has been directed towards privately-owned facilities, and mainly their ownership those they deem as “private equity”, because of their great sin of caring for nursing home patients at a profit, and often not even at one. However, a recent Supreme Court ruling is now opening up public SNFs to the threat of lawsuits on the basis of civil rights violations. After the wife of a patient with dementia in a county-owned SNF in Indiana sued alleging he was unnecessarily chemically restrained and involuntarily transferred without their consent, which would be violations of the Federal Nursing Home Reform... Read More »
60 Seconds with Swett: Welltower Increases Guidance
Welltower came out with a business update for June, and there was some good news on the financial front, particularly in regard to labor cost trends. First, the REIT was able to raise guidance for both its 2023 net income attributable to common stockholders and 2023 normalized FFO on the back of better-than-expected operating results in its SHOP portfolio and a bolstered balance sheet. Operationally, the REIT reported that same-store RevPOR continued to grow at a faster rate than ExpPOR in the first quarter of this year, the fifth consecutive quarter of margin expansion. This was helped in part by agency labor expense as a percentage of total compensation dropping to 3.4% in the first... Read More »
60 Seconds with Steve Monroe: A Win For Providers
We all know that the Life Care Centers of America nursing home in Kirkland, Washington was the location of the first major SNF outbreak of COVID at the beginning of the pandemic. Well, the families of two residents who died sued the facility, the management company and some employees for negligence. As I have stated too many times, this early in the pandemic no one really knew what was going on, no one understood the severity, and no one knew what to do with the early cases, if they even had test kits, and to be held liable for deaths in those early weeks did not seem to make sense. While the jury found that the company was not at fault for the deaths of the two women, the jury found... Read More »
60 Seconds with Swett: The Keys to Retirement Success
Last week, a partnership between Age Wave and Edward Jones conducted a survey with The Harris Poll, getting more than 12,000 respondents, the majority of which were retirees and pre-retirees, to answer questions on the keys to success in retirement. With Edward Jones as one of the initiators of the survey, being a major financial advisory firm, you could bet that one of the main takeaways was going to be the importance of financial preparedness for retirees. Indeed, the report revealed that six in 10 Americans who plan to retire believe they can afford a comfortable and secure retirement lasting more than 10 years. To that we would just say what about the other 40%, a significant portion... Read More »
60 Seconds with Swett: An End to the Public Health Emergency
After more than three years in effect, the federal COVID-19 public health emergency ended on May 11. That seems like a moment worth celebrating, after the upheaval the country has experienced since the beginning of the pandemic. The vast majority of Americans wouldn’t have noticed the switch, since life has been pretty much back to normal for over a year now. But health care facilities will feel the change. Although states and localities may have different rules, staff vaccine mandates that caused a lot of consternation and even reached the Supreme Court will end at nursing homes, thereby hopefully relieving some of the staffing stresses on facilities. Continuous enrollment policies... Read More »Schedule a demo
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