Investigation from Senate Democrats Reveals Strategies Used by Corporate Investors in Nursing Homes to Siphon Taxpayer Dollars to Profits Instead of Staffing and Care
Washington, D.C. – Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., Andy Kim, D-N.J., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., today released a new investigation revealing harm to residents in nursing homes as Donald Trump hands out political favors and grants clemency to nursing home owners convicted of fraud and other financial crimes.
“This report is the product of a Senate Finance Committee Minority investigation into how the Trump administration has accelerated a crisis that was already years in the making–rewarding investors who put profits over people and abandoning nursing home residents and workers,” the senators wrote in a cover letter for the report. “It documents the bad actors, the backdoor deals, and the human cost when Trump is in charge of America’s long-term care. For American families with a loved one in a nursing home, there is no greater fear than an unsafe environment that could lead to abuse or neglect. They deserve a government that safeguards their loved ones and prevents harm from ever happening in the first place.”
The report documents the sophisticated strategies nursing home operators and their private equity and corporate backers use to hide profits, cut staff, and skirt safety regulations and examines how Trump and his allies collected political donations and rewarded bad actors with deregulation and political favors.
The consequences of this deregulation and understaffing are deadly. The report documents horrific and sometimes fatal instances of harm, including nursing home residents suffering from severe neglect, untreated infections, and preventable deaths when they wander away from unsecured facilities. In other cases, nursing homes relied on chemical restraints, inappropriately drugging residents with antipsychotics to make up for a lack of staff.
The key findings from the report are:
- Investment entities have built business models that systematically extract taxpayer dollars from nursing homes.
- The financial structures used to siphon money from nursing homes are largely invisible to regulators and families.
- The oversight system meant to catch bad actors is underfunded and failing. Nearly a third of nursing homes are behind on annual inspections.
- Trump rewarded bad actors with pardons, commutations, and political appointments, all while claiming to mount a faulty “full-scale war on fraud.”
- Nursing home residents across the country are suffering preventable harm, including neglect, infections, and death due to chronic understaffing.
The report concludes by making clear that a comprehensive update to federal nursing home policy is needed to protect nursing home residents and ensure that bad actors aren’t able to use sophisticated business practices to avoid oversight. Earlier this month, Wyden led the release of a request for information seeking feedback on proposals to address the structural conditions that allowed nursing home bad actors to thrive and an array of additional policies to update long-term care in America.
The text of the report, including the cover letter and executive summary, is here.
A web version of this release is here.
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