60 Seconds with Swett: Managed Care Continues To Eye Home Health
We don’t need to tell you that the pandemic enabled healthcare to be delivered in the home at historic rates, as patients could see doctors on Zoom, medications could be delivered, and home health aides could provide other care and services. Anything to avoid the dreaded hospital or nursing home while COVID was raging. Coming back from the Spring NIC in Dallas, where we saw abundant optimism (and some caution from a few of you), one may not think this will be a huge threat. But UnitedHealth Group’s potential acquisition of home health provider LHC Group for a reported $5.4 billion reminds us that the penetration rate for in-facility senior care services is always on the verge of falling.... Read More »
60 Seconds with Steve Monroe: Senior Housing Women’s Initiative
Bring out the pink at this week’s NIC Conference in Dallas and show your support for women in seniors housing. I hope you have noticed, like I have, the growing ranks of women in seniors housing and care. Think back 20 years ago at NIC, or even 10 years, and women were far and few between in attendance. They are operators, investors, lenders, lawyers, brokers, appraisers, consultants – everything under the sun. And this makes perfect sense. Our industry is an employer of women. Something like 75% or more of employees in seniors housing are women, and I am sure they all like to see other women in leadership roles. And, by seeing them in these roles, it is something they... Read More »
60 Seconds with Swett: Spring NIC Returns to Dallas
This time next week, we will be arriving in Dallas for the annual Spring NIC Conference. The last NIC in Houston felt relatively normal, but this conference is the first since national and state mask mandates have, for the most part, ended. And finally, the general consensus seems to be that we are in an endemic now. So, the industry is moving on in this “new normal.” (who’s ready to hear those words a lot in Dallas?). Given that, there should be a lot of optimism around rising occupancy, low construction levels and “COVID” playbooks. But we hope some of that optimism is tempered with some realism. Occupancy is rising, but from historically low points, and with bumps along with way (as... Read More »Two Years After The Start
It has now been two years since the official start of the declared pandemic, and the entire seniors housing and care industry has been rising from the bottom of last March. But what now? It seems that from a census perspective we have clawed back up to 50% of what was lost, but the pace of census expansion has slowed. The labor shortages are causing some providers to put their own hold on new admissions, and the ever-increasing labor costs are putting a permanent dent into operating margins. All of this is happening at a time when the industry really needs to prepare for the aging baby boomers, and not worry about how it is going to provide the needed staffing. Next Thursday, March... Read More »
60 Seconds with Swett: SNFs and the State of the Union
With all that is going on in the country and abroad, it was nice for President Biden to carve out some time to talk about nursing homes in his State of the Union address last night. He said, “as Wall Street firms take over more nursing homes, quality in those homes has gone down and costs have gone up. That ends on my watch.” He was citing JAMA Health Forum’s November 2021 study linking private equity ownership of nursing homes with more hospitalizations and higher Medicare costs, but we’ve said before that study is very misleading. Mr. Biden also promised that Medicare would set higher standards for nursing homes, while also cutting costs. We’re not sure what kind of voodoo government... Read More »Schedule a demo
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