Between 2004 and 2016 there were 20,150 excess deaths in American nursing homes, amounting to an estimated 160,000 lost years of life. The cause wasn’t a pandemic, but private equity.
Economists analyzed the mortality of patients in 18,485 nursing homes acquired by private equity companies between 2000 and 2017, versus other forms of for-profit ownership. It found that the likelihood of dying in a nursing home within the first 90 days of being admitted—a measure that’s a pr...