Recent Articles on Nursing Homes

Two recent articles of note on nursing homes-in case you missed them. 

Kaiser Health News: Nursing Homes are suing friends and family of residents to collect debts.  This article is a result of a "partnership between KHN and NPR exploring the scale, impact, and causes of medical debt in America."

Politico:  The Crisis Facing Nursing Homes, Assisted Living and Home Care for America’s Elderly. I've blogged several times about the caregiver shortage, so consider this from the article:

Since January 2020, 400,000 nursing home and assisted living staff have quit, citing pandemic exhaustion as well as the low pay and lack of advancement opportunities typical of the field. The job losses arrive when America already faces an elder caregiver shortage, as 10,000 people daily turn 65 and birth rates decline. The labor shortage gripping America’s workforce across industries is felt most acutely in home health care. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, home health and personal care aides are actually the fastest growing industry, projected to grow 33 percent in the next decade, much faster than all occupations. But there still simply aren’t enough workers to fill the demand.

“The numbers alone suggest we’re going to need a lot more people in the caregiving sector than we have now,” says Tara Watson, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and professor of economics at Wiilliams College. “We need to make some changes in order for that to happen.”