Hello, I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

It is Tuesday, today the 23rd of January.

Thanks so much for joining the pod.

We're going to talk about the nursing home industry today

and more specifically what happens when money money money in the form of

private equity gets involved. Yes if we are lucky all of us will get older and

need some kind of help many of us will get older and need some kind of help. Many of us would love to age at home and

place, you know, comfortable and whatever, but the truth is that a lot of us are going to end up in nursing

homes or assisted living facilities and if not us then maybe

our loved ones and a couple years ago the Biden administration raised a lot of concerns

about the state of nursing homes and corporate investment in that industry.

So to learn more about this and hopefully get some guidance on what the future may look like for some or all of us,

we wanted to get smart about it. So here to make a smart is

Mark Unru. He's a professor of Population Health Sciences at Cornell Medical College.

Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me today. So first can you lay the kind of groundwork about how big this industry is the nursing home assisted living facility industry and you know who lives there?

Sure so there are about 15,000 nursing homes in the US.

Most are for profit about two-thirds of the facilities. They take care

of basically two populations. One population is for post-acute care and these are generally

individuals who are just discharged from the hospital but

aren't quite well enough to go home yet and spend a few weeks in the facility receiving

rehabilitation therapy.

And the other population is there for long-term care.

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