Long-term care providers can surely use a smile in times like these, even if it means a bittersweet grin in the end.
For your entertainment and educational purposes, we turn our attention to the classic movie “Blazing Saddles.” Amid all the double entendres, biting social commentary, flatulence scenes and general screwball antics, there are quite a few memorable lines.
Steering clear of the more risque examples, I’m referring to an amusing delivery by the former NFL lineman-turned-actor Alex Karras. He plays a simpleton behemoth who at one point punches out a horse.
In another scene, his dimwitted character stoically, yet hilariously, mouths one of the most profound lines in the award-winning film: “Mongo only pawn in game of life.”
Welcome to Mongo’s world, nursing homes.
McKnight’s reports today on a study sure to produce muffled howls, from the vaults of private equity aggressors to the boardrooms of top nursing home groups.
The report’s focus is an international review of private equity takeovers of healthcare settings, with plenty of emphasis on nursing homes. The researchers from five universities in three countries (including the US), don’t paint a pretty picture.
When private equity swoops in, as it has increasingly done lately, things get more expensive for everybody — except the big-bucks property traders themselves. Also, quality of life takes a dip (and, again, researchers aren’t talking about quality for the free-wheeling investors).
It seems the academics have struck upon, or finally remembered, the axiom about business people being in it for the money. Perhaps most worrisome to many is the fact that most nursing homes being transacted lately are moving from nonprofit hands to for-profit operators.
One way or another, it’s a sure sign that the nursing home business is getting rougher and tougher to survive in. Those with a mission other than plunging outside money quickly in and out of the business can vouch for that.
Then again, there are people working for the White House who are trying to make things more level in that regard.
This new study’s findings seem either an extension of a President Biden State of the Union Address — or fodder for his next one.
Despite Biden’s first broadside at nursing home investors in his 2022 SOTU address, however, the acquisitions market has hardly slowed down. Nursing homes continue to be pursued and traded, sometimes at record-high volumes or prices.
Much like Mongo, sometimes they, too, are just a tool.
James M. Berklan is McKnight’s Executive Editor.
Opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News columns are not necessarily those of McKnight’s.
