![]() And the key question here is, how much can nursing homes afford? - because if they can't afford to hire a lot more people, then the government's going to have to pay a lot more through Medicare or Medicaid. RAU: The Biden administration is thinking about creating some really strong new requirements that nursing homes have to have a lot more nurses and a lot more aides on staff at all times. How do these financial factors figure into that decision? SUMMERS: The Biden administration is currently in the middle of deciding whether to require nursing homes to have more aides and nurses on staff. But we just don't know because they don't have to report the details. So it's very possible that this is happening not just in other homes in New York state but around the country because the majority of for-profit nursing homes have these type of financial arrangements. I mean, she accuses one owner of taking $16 million in profits over the course of about four years, one set of owners of taking $16 million of profits over four years and others of taking similarly large amounts. We do know from the lawsuits, the allegations there, the attorney general was able to subpoena bank records. RAU: The short answer is we don't know because they're not required to report it. SUMMERS: So what happens, then, to all that money? Does it end up with the nursing home owners and their investors? And we found that these other companies that the owners also owned were making high profits in the year 2020, average profits of 27%. ![]() But what's new about it is that what we were able to do is, because of the attention on the pandemic, take a look at what was going on in one state with unusually detailed records, and that was New York state. It's common in the industry that owners have multiple companies that basically take care of all the things with nursing homes, and they move a lot of money into it. ![]() RAU: These have been going on long before the pandemic. The first is, how common are these types of arrangements? And separately, were they prompted by the pandemic? SUMMERS: So this raises a couple questions here. And the lawsuits charge that they overpaid large amounts and that these other companies were, in fact, owned by the same people and controlled by the same people that own the nursing home. JORDAN RAU: The attorney general has accused three separate nursing homes of moving a lot of the money that was in the nursing homes out and paying it to other companies, companies that they hired to provide management or staffing or, in some cases, to rent the building from. What has the state attorney general accused them of doing? And, Jordan, you've been reporting on this lawsuit that alleges financial practices that seem disconcerting, to say the very least, at some of these nursing homes. The New York State Attorney General's office is also suing several homes for fraud. That is according to an investigation by Jordan Rau with Kaiser Health News. The owners of some nursing homes in New York have been making millions of dollars in profits even while they've gotten generous payments and loans from the federal government during the pandemic.
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