Skilled Nursing Must-Reads: Industry Pressures, 33-SNF Bankruptcy

Welcome to Skilled Nursing News’s regular look at the biggest headlines from the week that was, your all-in-one place for the top stories you need to jumpstart your day and discover the things you may have missed.

SNN brought you a peek into PointClickCare’s annual customer summit in Orlando, where executives declared that skilled nursing is “under pressure from every imaginable direction.” Russ DePriest, the software company’s senior vice president and general manager of skilled nursing,  also hinted at opportunities for mid-sized providers despite the overall headwinds.

Bankruptcy alert: 33 SNFs affiliated with Preferred Care Partners Management Group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing 163 personal injury lawsuits — including a $28 million judgment in Kentucky.

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More news from Genesis HealthCare (NYSE: GEN), which after announcing a major restructuring effort earlier in the month, received a $19 million rent cut from landlord Sabra Health Care REIT (Nasdaq: SBRA).The deal constitutes one component of Sabra’s long-term plan to sell off its entire Genesis-operated portfolio, which the REIT has dubbed the “Genesis Exodus.”

And finally, SNN profiled a planned skilled nursing facility set to go up on the campus of Jacksonville University, which will develop a close partnership between its health sciences students and operator Clear Choice Health Care — with the goal of even further breaking down the barriers between tomorrow’s caregivers and the elder-care industry.

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The New Yorker’s Tad Friend took an extended look at ageism in the United States, exploring the ways we collectively perceive the aging process — and concluding that ageism may always exist because it represents a way for young people to deal with their own internal fears of growing old and dying.

“Ageism is so hard to root out because it allows us to ward off a paralyzing fact with a pleasing fiction,” Friend writes. “It lets us fool ourselves, for a time, into believing we’ll never die. It’s not a paradox that ageists are dissing their future selves — it’s the whole point of the exercise.”

The piece is worth setting aside the time for a detailed look at various philosophies surrounding aging, including one theory that says older folks should neither resign themselves to physical decline nor attempt to overcorrect by entering a kind of renewed adolescence.

“If you go skydiving, as George H.W. Bush did on his 90th birthday, you’re guilty of ‘competitive ableism,’” Friend writes of that particular worldview.

Written by Alex Spanko

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