Amid an aging population and a growing role for private equity (PE) in the care of older adults, this paper studies how PE ownership affects U.S. nursing homes using patient-level Medicare data. We show that PE ownership leads to a patient cohort with lower health risk. However, after instrumenting for the patient-nursing home match, we find that PE ownership increases mortality by 11%. Declines in measures of patient well-being, nurse staffing, and compliance with care standards help to explain the mortality effect. Overall, we conclude that PE has nuanced effects with adverse outcomes for a subset of patients.
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Gupta et al. (2023) studied this question.
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