Joshi Ashwin L&S Social Sciences
Public-Private Data Gap in Senior Care Infrastructure
America’s aging population requires unprecedented investment in long-term care, and doing that well requires knowing who actually controls the facilities providing it. Federal disclosure requires nursing homes to name their owners, but that disclosure typically stops at a shell entity created to hold a single building, leaving policymakers unable to see the networks actually setting the budget. My research closes that gap: an open, fully cited dataset resolving the ultimate controlling owner behind every Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing home in California, Florida, Washington, and Arizona, 2,192 facilities, using only free public records. It’s now published on Dryad: https://datadryad.org/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.nvx0k6f7j.
One of my interesting findings was that private equity, the ownership category federal policy is built to catch, accounts for only 3 percent of these facilities, while family-controlled networks account for 64 percent. My senior thesis extends this to Medicare cost reports to test whether financial extraction tracks ownership category or simply scale.
Message To Sponsor
Thank you so much for your generous support of my SURF fellowship; your donation is what makes this critical work possible. I am deeply passionate about bridging the public-private data gap in senior care to ensure that as we scale necessary financial infrastructure, we also protect the human dignity of our aging population. Your funding allows me to dedicate this summer to building the empirical tools needed to bring transparency and sustainability to America's long-term care systems.