Tapas Thursday: Small Health Policy News Bites

I like tapas from time to time, especially for a happy hour gathering. Thursday seems to always be a good day to have little bites of something prior to a big weekend; even better if Friday is a short day or a day off into the weekend. In a post earlier this week I mentioned … Read more

Are Independent Primary Care Docs a Thing of the Past?

The COVID pandemic illustrated a whole bunch of flaws, holes, and gaps within the U.S. health care system. To be fair, the pandemic illustrated flaws, holes, and gaps within U.S. society, government, the economy, etc. A trend that has been slowly moving forward seems to be accelerating through and post the pandemic and that trend … Read more

Friday Feature: GDP Report

Yesterday, the second quarter GDP report (economic activity) was released. This is the initial print from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. It will see two more prints but the initial one is always the headline story. Revisions of late, tend to be down versus up (improvement). I eschew the headlines for the details as the … Read more

Not Just Senior Living…Hospitals Too

Lately I’ve written a fair amount (multiple articles) regarding the economic conditions in senior living/post-acute care. The current economic headwinds of rising capital costs/interest rates, labor scarcity, rising costs due to labor scarcity and commodity inflation have caused providers to rethink many operating assumptions. Margins have eroded and often, decisions about additional volume via admissions, … Read more

Fed Rate Action and the Impact on Seniors Housing

Yesterday, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate by .25 basis points (one quarter of on percent). The effective rate is now 5.25 to 5.50 percent. This is highest Fed Funds rate in 22 years. For the past multiple weeks, I have been writing on how the rate progress has impacted (negatively), seniors housing. … Read more

Senior Living Occupancy Trends – A Bit More Data

  I’ve been closely watching the post-pandemic recovery of the senior care and living industries. In the past sixty days or so, I’ve written a number of articles/posts on occupancy recovery, factors impacting recovery, and factors that may further stress recovery trends.  Within these posts/articles, reference material exists from sources like Fitch, National Investment Center … Read more

Senior Living and Care M&A: Two Worlds

In a report provided by Ziegler investment bank, M&A activity in the non-profit industry segment is “up” for the first half of the year, near record levels. The report suggests the pace will continue into the second half. Compare this data to report from Levin that deal activity was down significantly in the first quarter … Read more

Friday Feature: Home Health Proposed Rule Implications

Last month, CMS dropped the 2024 PPS Proposed Rule for Home Health. Like all other provider segments, Proposed Rules function to address primarily payment, then other programmatic issues/rules such as quality measures, data reporting, etc. The proposals generally mirror the final rules, but tweaks do occur. The payment end, however, rarely changes much as often, … Read more

Real Estate Sales Report Out – Dismal News for Seniors and Senior Housing

The June existing home sales report from the National Association of Realtors paints a depressing picture of the residential real estate market. The release is here: https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/existing-home-sales-retreated-3-3-in-june-monthly-median-sales-price-reached-second-highest-amount Home sales down 3.3 percent Sales off 18.9% from a year ago Inventory available for sale didn’t change – 2.8 months (seasonally adjusted) Median prices rose again to … Read more

Friday Feature: The Good Acquisition

Organizational expansion is truly a tale of two options (primarily): add capacity organically (build or start from scratch) or acquire an existing business. Both have pluses and minuses, but when it comes to scale on a more rapid basis and movement into a new market area, acquisition tends to make more sense versus an organic … Read more