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Investing In Nasdaq 100 In 2000

Investing In Nasdaq 100 In 2000

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Nasdaq 100

There are two schools of thought when it comes to value investing.

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Value And Growth Are Connected

The first school of thought is that value and growth are connected at the dot. You have to pay a higher multiple for future growth.

Another school of thought believes that you need to wait and not overpay for future growth.
Sometimes, the investors who wait to buy at the right price, and avoid overpaying tend to look very smart. Like avoiding buying Japanese stocks in 1989 or Tech stocks in 2000.

Other times, buying stocks at any price seems to be a winning combination. Like buying tech stocks in 2010, or 1990 or buying Japanese stocks in 1980.

Many investors today believe that stocks are overvalued. Others believe that stocks are priced correctly for the environment we are in.

We have all heard that stocks return 10%/year. This is correct for the stock market as a whole. But when you dig through on the individual security level, you can find that a lot of companies tend to not do very well. Some research found that most companies tend to do worse than Treasury bills. The great stock market returns are driven by a handful of companies that tend to push the fortunes of investors upwards.

Investing In Large Blue Chip Companies

Depending on how you view the data however, you can see that the largest companies that are profitable, tend to continue delivering profits to shareholders. This is perhaps why investing in well known large blue chip companies that make money has worked so well, and is so popular with DIY investors. Focusing on smaller and less known companies is more speculative, and this is precisely where the majority of companies with terrible returns tend to hang out.

If you look at a list of companies at the beginning of a period, and trace the results 10 or 20 years down the road, you get to see a very interesting observation. Notably, the paretto principle in action.

The paretto principle for equities should state that 20% of companies are responsible for 80% of equity returns. This is why you need to have great diversification, but also focus on quality too. While we do not know which the best companies over the next 20 years are going to be, we know that we need to diversify, and hopefully our portfolio as a whole should do ok.

This is a very interesting exercise for me to go through as well, because it does tell me that predicting future winners and losers from a list is very difficult. I've tried it before, but my success could have been due to luck, than skill.

This exercise also teaches me that investing is part art, part science. It also teaches me that the overall results from a portfolio would be dependent on a few big winners. So if I sell those winners early, that would mean that I would be stuck with a mediocre investment career. If I hold on to those winners, I may look like a winner at the end. The goal is to build a diversified portfolio, and stick to my holdings. I encourage investors to read more about the Coffee Can Approach.

Low P/E Ratio Signals Value

In general, a low P/E ratio signals "value" to many investors. However, if a company with a low P/E ratio never grows earnings or even worse, its profits decline over time and even turn to losses due to challenging business conditions, it may turn out to be a value trap.

On the other hand, companies with high P/E ratios may signal "danger" to many investors. However, a company with a high P/E ratio that manages to grow earnings per share over time may turn out to have been a cheaper stock than a low P/E one.

Of course, while P/E ratio and dividend yield are relatively known today, the future growth of earnings and the business are tough to ascertain with any certainty.

The funny part is that neither of these approaches works all the time. Things are cyclical in nature. Sometimes the so called value approach works great, and it washes out the growth investors.
After that, the growth cycle comes into gear, and these companies and investors tend to smoke out any value investors.

Both can work, but over long periods of time. Even if your approach works eventually, it may be a very long and testing process, where the majority of results re not visible until the end.

For example, investing in the Nifty 50 in 1972 delivered similar results to investing in S&P 500 through 1998. Source: Valuing Growth Stocks: Revisiting the Nifty Fifty

That's despite teh fact that the Nifty 50 sold at ridiculously high P/E ratios. It turned out that as a whole, these companies were priced right as a group, since their earnings growth more than compensated for the high P/E ratios. Of course, long-term investors had a long and trying time in the market, since the first decade after 1972 brought poor results, as these companies went back to more reasonable valuation. The valuation compression ate into returns in the first decade, despite the fact that these businesses were still growing profits. Ultimately, the long-term returns of these businesses were dependent on the underlying fundamentals growth in these businesses. If someone bcame scared or lost patience after a decade of poor or no returns, they would have bought high and sold low.

The results of two different investors in the same Nifty 50 stocks would have varied significantly based on their start/end timeframe. Someone who started in 1972 would have had their conviction tested in the first decade, before recovering and ultimately recovering nicely. However, if someone started just a few years later, they would have done fantastically. I often think about results we see, if we did one thing at a certain time versus another. Since we as humans learn from experience, it is interesting to observe how early success or failure would affect our psyche as investors. If you fail early on, you may give up, even if that failure may have been a simple test of conviction ( albeit with a 70% drawdown in 2 years). If we experience winning from the start, we may see things differently.

Let's think about value versus growth with another example. Between 1950 and 2003, Exxon had a lower rate of growth and a lower P/E than IBM. However, Exxon did better for its investors than IBM. Mostly because the dividends were reinvested back into a low P/E, low valuation. The stock was not overvalued relative to its earnings prospects.

Recently, we have the Nasdaq 100 reaching all time highs, which has made some investors very confused. After all, we are in the midsts of a global pandemic that would have far-reaching repercussions for the world economy for years down the road. The US GDP has contracted by the highest amount in Q2 2020, and we have the same situation for a large part of the developed world. Unemployment is high, and there are riots on the streets.

Plenty of investors see that news, and assume a bearish view. This view is reinforced by high valuations for stocks. Many are comparing the high valuations today with the Nifty Fifty from 1972, and the Dot Com bubble from 1999 - 2000.

Nifty Fifty Stocks

Prof Jeremy Siegel has already discussed how investing in the original Nifty Fifty has done for investors through 1998. I decided to go back and see how a passive investor in the Nasdaq 100 would have done if they bought in January 2000. If we are in a similar situation as in 2000, perhaps studying how it turned out, may give us some ideas on how to proceed today.

If you bought Nasdaq 100 in 2000, you would have basically tripled your money by July 2020. This is not a bad deal, given the fact that tech stocks were ridiculously expensive in 2000. With sky-high P/E ratios that made little sense, but fueled by the belief in unlimited future growth prospects. Of course, to get there, you had to endure a long and grueling period of about 13 - 14 years, before breaking even. This would have tested the nerves of many investors.

It was fascinating for me to dig a little further. I was able to find the components for Nasdaq 100 companies in 2000. You can view the companies in the list below. It has it sorted by portfolio weight.

the Nasdaq 100

The next step I took was to calculate the returns for each company from January 1, 2000 to July 17, 2020. This is shown in the third column above. The column shows how a $10,000 investment in one company on January 3, 2000 turned to be worth by July 17, 2020.

This was a fun exercise. I used the site dividendchannel.com to calculate total stock returns. For other companies that were difficult to find, I looked at various databases available through my source, as well as old news/newspapers.

It is possible that an academic with access to a nice database may be able to get the results easier, and with less errors. I am limited by the fact that I am one person with one computer ( and a lazy intern).
My assumptions were that I would invest $10,000 in each of the 100 Nasdaq 100 companies on January 3, 2000. I would hold till July 17, 2020.

If a company is acquired, I just keep the dollars in cash. I did not assume any reinvestment, which would have likely further increased returns. That’s because most of these acquisitions occurred when stocks were cheaper five years ago. I also did not track how an exchange in the acquirers shares would have done. But my goal was to research how each individual company fared as an investment, and go from there. It very is likely that I am understating investor returns with this methodology. If you are able to quickly make calculations using historical databases at your disposal, your input would be much appreciated.

It turned out that if you equally weighted the 100 companies in Nasdaq 100 from 2000, you ended up quadrupling your investment.

If you drill down on the individual company level, you can see that only 50 companies delivered a profit to their shareholders. The other 50 delivered a loss to their shareholders.

Only 23 companies managed to at least triple the returns. Ten of these companies accounted for $2.65 million of the $3.1 million in gains - so basically for close to 90% of the gains. If you had sold these ten companies, but held on to the others, you would have barely broken even after 20 years.

Investing In The Nasdaq 100 Trust Etf

A $1,000,000 investment on January 3, 2000 was spread over 100 companies, investing $10,000 in each. By July 17, 2020, that investment turned out to be worth $4.089 million. That's better than the $3.32 million if you had merely invested in the Nasdaq 100 Trust Etf (QQQ).

In other words, you did better than the Nasdaq 100 itself.

That’s because I assumed equal weighting, which gives each company the same opportunity to the top. The Nasdaq 100 is a market capitalization weighted, which means that the largest companies are given a higher weight. These large companies in 2000 were Cisco and Intel, both of which were overvalued and too large to grow as fast as their market prices in 2000 suggested. There were a lot of other large companies from 2000, which did not do that well – JDS Uniphase, Sun Microsystems etc.
Microsoft did pretty well, rising fivefold in value, most of the gains being in the last 6 – 7 years however.

The 10 largest companies accounted for over 43.60% of the index value. They didn't do as well, as an equally weighted $100,000 investment turned out to be worth $136,554 by 2020.

the Nasdaq 100

Most of the gains were driven by the companies that had a small allocation to the Nasdaq 100 in 2000. This goes contrary to the idea that you should concentrate your portfolio in your best ideas.

You can see that the ten best performing companies from Nasdaq 100 from January 2000 represented less than a 5% weighting in the index around the time of the dot-com bubble. Yet an investment of $100,000 that was allocated equally between these ten companies turned out to a cool $2.757 million by July 2020.

the Nasdaq 100

In fact, the best performing company in Nasdaq 100 from 2000 was Apple, which turned out to be a 100 bagger through July 2020. It had a 1% weighting in Nasdaq 100 in 2000.

Amazon was a 33 bagger, but it had a less than half a percent allocation in Nasdaq 100.

The other reason why it did so well is because there was not a lot of forced turnover. Usually, index committees actively take in and out stocks from an index. That activity reduces investment costs and returns. You may notice that the companies in the Nasdaq 100 that quadrupled your money were already public in 2000. You did not need to own companies that went public after 2000, which is somewhat counter-intuitive to many investors.

Lessons Learned From The Study

There are several lessons I learned from this study. I will discuss how they will impact my investing.

The first lesson is that we do not know in advance which the best performers over the next 10 or 20 years will be. That’s why it makes sense to diversify. The paretto principle in action works here – a small group of companies provide most of the investment returns, while the rest are losers. This means to avoid selling as much as possible. If you sold Apple or Amazon in 2000, you would have not achieved great returns. A lot of investors make the mistake of selling their winners early, because supposedly nobody went broke taking a profit. That’s bullshit. When you sell shares, you are taking a huge risk. If you sell early some of the companies that turn out to be the biggest winners in your portfolio, you are destined for a life of investment mediocrity. If you keep them, you may live to see another day and possibly make a profit. Let your winners run, and keep losses small.

The second lesson is that we need to be as patient as possible when investing. It may take us a long period of time to realize our investment gains. For example, a lot of companies in the index, and the index itself, spent a large portion of time in a drawdown (losing money). If you look at Microsoft (MSFT), you can see that up until 2013 an investment in 2000 was under water.

That’s why you need to keep your investment, and not sell. It is hard to do, especially if you are sitting at a loss for 10 – 15 years. Sometimes, good things take time to occur.

The third lesson is that future returns are unpredictable. A company may not go anywhere for a decade, leading many investors to sell. That’s usually how it goes, since when everyone bails out, the company starts succeeding. So you need to keep invested,

The fourth lesson is to give each company an equal chance of success. The ten largest companies in Nasdaq 100 in 2000 accounted for more than 40% of the index weight. Yet, they turned a $100,000 investment to $136,000 by 2020.

The fifth lesson is that valuation matters. The companies in 2000 were overvalued as a group. Perhaps the 10 or 20 largest companies were overvalued the most, dragging the valuation multiples upwards. But the high valuation made making future returns more difficult to accomplish. If all the future growth for the next 20 years is priced in today, you will likely make no returns. If it turns out that the 2000 investors were over optimistic, they you would suffer losses. Either way, as a group, it took the list of companies a decade go through the valuation compression, even if they did better fundamentally. Then it took another decade for the growth in fundamentals to lift investment returns too. It is also likely that valuation multiples are high today as well.

The reason why stocks went nowhere between 2000 – 2013 was mostly because they were so overvalued in 2000. If stocks had been cheaper in 2000, investors would have likely enjoyed a return in 2000-2010 and 2010- 2020. But in the stock market, returns are lumpy (unless you are focusing on dividends of course).

The sixth lesson is that passive investing works. To me, passive investing does not mean just buying an index fund. It means assembling a diversified portfolio of investments, limiting turnover and costs, and holding for the long with a limited interruption to the compounding process. Selling is costly, because you risk getting rid of one of the few companies that can lift your portfolio returns. Hence, holding on tight works, since the reduced turnover reduces commissions, fees and taxes, along with the aforementioned behavioral costs.

There are actually tax advantages to constructing a holding such a portfolio in a taxable account. Since a large portion of companies ended up losing money, the investor generated tax losses to offset income. These are worth something in a direct portfolio, and this is something that is no passed on to holders for ETFs or mutual funds.

The majority of companies that lost money ended up delisting due to failure or due to an acquisition. For the 45 companies where the investment value was less than 10,000 on 7/17/2020, and had an end date associated with a delisting, the ending value was $128,344. Yet, a cool $450,000 was invested in those enterprises. This leads to a long-term capital loss carryforward of $320,000. This can be used to offset future capital gains when realized, or to offset regular income.

We also had 17 companies that were delisted most probably due to an acquisition/merger, resulting in a profit. The net effect is $389,693 in value, which creates a long-term capital gain of close to $270,000. I know for a fact that Sigma-Aldrich (SIAL) was completed in cash in 2015, so a third of those long-term gains of $270,000 were not deferred by exchanging the acquirer stock for the acquired company stock.

Ok then, perhaps it is best to invest in a tax-deferred account then in order to minimize the headaches at tax time every year.

The seventh lesson is the importance of luck in investing. While valuation is important, it is only visible in hindsight, as valuation is part art, part science. Stocks may stay overvalued for an extended period of time. In fact, many believed that stocks were overvalued as early as 1992, and 1994 – 1995 and particularly in 1996 with Greenspan’s famous quote about “irrational exuberance”. Yet if you had bought stocks at that date, you would have done very well for yourself ( assuming you had the patience to hold on for 25 years without selling). If you managed to buy this list in 2010, you would have done very well, as valuations were much cheaper than in 2000. Since most returns occurred 10 years ago, this means that the investor buying in 2010 has the view that stocks only go up and they enjoyed all the gains that the 2000 investor had, but in half the time.

The post Investing In Nasdaq 100 In 2000 appeared first on ValueWalk.

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Separating Information From Disinformation: Threats From The AI Revolution

Separating Information From Disinformation: Threats From The AI Revolution

Authored by Per Bylund via The Mises Institute,

Artificial intelligence…

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Separating Information From Disinformation: Threats From The AI Revolution

Authored by Per Bylund via The Mises Institute,

Artificial intelligence (AI) cannot distinguish fact from fiction. It also isn’t creative or can create novel content but repeats, repackages, and reformulates what has already been said (but perhaps in new ways).

I am sure someone will disagree with the latter, perhaps pointing to the fact that AI can clearly generate, for example, new songs and lyrics. I agree with this, but it misses the point. AI produces a “new” song lyric only by drawing from the data of previous song lyrics and then uses that information (the inductively uncovered patterns in it) to generate what to us appears to be a new song (and may very well be one). However, there is no artistry in it, no creativity. It’s only a structural rehashing of what exists.

Of course, we can debate to what extent humans can think truly novel thoughts and whether human learning may be based solely or primarily on mimicry. However, even if we would—for the sake of argument—agree that all we know and do is mere reproduction, humans have limited capacity to remember exactly and will make errors. We also fill in gaps with what subjectively (not objectively) makes sense to us (Rorschach test, anyone?). Even in this very limited scenario, which I disagree with, humans generate novelty beyond what AI is able to do.

Both the inability to distinguish fact from fiction and the inductive tether to existent data patterns are problems that can be alleviated programmatically—but are open for manipulation.

Manipulation and Propaganda

When Google launched its Gemini AI in February, it immediately became clear that the AI had a woke agenda. Among other things, the AI pushed woke diversity ideals into every conceivable response and, among other things, refused to show images of white people (including when asked to produce images of the Founding Fathers).

Tech guru and Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen summarized it on X (formerly Twitter): “I know it’s hard to believe, but Big Tech AI generates the output it does because it is precisely executing the specific ideological, radical, biased agenda of its creators. The apparently bizarre output is 100% intended. It is working as designed.”

There is indeed a design to these AIs beyond the basic categorization and generation engines. The responses are not perfectly inductive or generative. In part, this is necessary in order to make the AI useful: filters and rules are applied to make sure that the responses that the AI generates are appropriate, fit with user expectations, and are accurate and respectful. Given the legal situation, creators of AI must also make sure that the AI does not, for example, violate intellectual property laws or engage in hate speech. AI is also designed (directed) so that it does not go haywire or offend its users (remember Tay?).

However, because such filters are applied and the “behavior” of the AI is already directed, it is easy to take it a little further. After all, when is a response too offensive versus offensive but within the limits of allowable discourse? It is a fine and difficult line that must be specified programmatically.

It also opens the possibility for steering the generated responses beyond mere quality assurance. With filters already in place, it is easy to make the AI make statements of a specific type or that nudges the user in a certain direction (in terms of selected facts, interpretations, and worldviews). It can also be used to give the AI an agenda, as Andreessen suggests, such as making it relentlessly woke.

Thus, AI can be used as an effective propaganda tool, which both the corporations creating them and the governments and agencies regulating them have recognized.

Misinformation and Error

States have long refused to admit that they benefit from and use propaganda to steer and control their subjects. This is in part because they want to maintain a veneer of legitimacy as democratic governments that govern based on (rather than shape) people’s opinions. Propaganda has a bad ring to it; it’s a means of control.

However, the state’s enemies—both domestic and foreign—are said to understand the power of propaganda and do not hesitate to use it to cause chaos in our otherwise untainted democratic society. The government must save us from such manipulation, they claim. Of course, rarely does it stop at mere defense. We saw this clearly during the covid pandemic, in which the government together with social media companies in effect outlawed expressing opinions that were not the official line (see Murthy v. Missouri).

AI is just as easy to manipulate for propaganda purposes as social media algorithms but with the added bonus that it isn’t only people’s opinions and that users tend to trust that what the AI reports is true. As we saw in the previous article on the AI revolution, this is not a valid assumption, but it is nevertheless a widely held view.

If the AI then can be instructed to not comment on certain things that the creators (or regulators) do not want people to see or learn, then it is effectively “memory holed.” This type of “unwanted” information will not spread as people will not be exposed to it—such as showing only diverse representations of the Founding Fathers (as Google’s Gemini) or presenting, for example, only Keynesian macroeconomic truths to make it appear like there is no other perspective. People don’t know what they don’t know.

Of course, nothing is to say that what is presented to the user is true. In fact, the AI itself cannot distinguish fact from truth but only generates responses according to direction and only based on whatever the AI has been fed. This leaves plenty of scope for the misrepresentation of the truth and can make the world believe outright lies. AI, therefore, can easily be used to impose control, whether it is upon a state, the subjects under its rule, or even a foreign power.

The Real Threat of AI

What, then, is the real threat of AI? As we saw in the first article, large language models will not (cannot) evolve into artificial general intelligence as there is nothing about inductive sifting through large troves of (humanly) created information that will give rise to consciousness. To be frank, we haven’t even figured out what consciousness is, so to think that we will create it (or that it will somehow emerge from algorithms discovering statistical language correlations in existing texts) is quite hyperbolic. Artificial general intelligence is still hypothetical.

As we saw in the second article, there is also no economic threat from AI. It will not make humans economically superfluous and cause mass unemployment. AI is productive capital, which therefore has value to the extent that it serves consumers by contributing to the satisfaction of their wants. Misused AI is as valuable as a misused factory—it will tend to its scrap value. However, this doesn’t mean that AI will have no impact on the economy. It will, and already has, but it is not as big in the short-term as some fear, and it is likely bigger in the long-term than we expect.

No, the real threat is AI’s impact on information. This is in part because induction is an inappropriate source of knowledge—truth and fact are not a matter of frequency or statistical probabilities. The evidence and theories of Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei would get weeded out as improbable (false) by an AI trained on all the (best and brightest) writings on geocentrism at the time. There is no progress and no learning of new truths if we trust only historical theories and presentations of fact.

However, this problem can probably be overcome by clever programming (meaning implementing rules—and fact-based limitations—to the induction problem), at least to some extent. The greater problem is the corruption of what AI presents: the misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation that its creators and administrators, as well as governments and pressure groups, direct it to create as a means of controlling or steering public opinion or knowledge.

This is the real danger that the now-famous open letter, signed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and others, pointed to:

“Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”

Other than the economically illiterate reference to “automat[ing] away all the jobs,” the warning is well-taken. AI will not Terminator-like start to hate us and attempt to exterminate mankind. It will not make us all into biological batteries, as in The Matrix. However, it will—especially when corrupted—misinform and mislead us, create chaos, and potentially make our lives “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Tyler Durden Fri, 03/15/2024 - 06:30

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‘Excess Mortality Skyrocketed’: Tucker Carlson and Dr. Pierre Kory Unpack ‘Criminal’ COVID Response

‘Excess Mortality Skyrocketed’: Tucker Carlson and Dr. Pierre Kory Unpack ‘Criminal’ COVID Response

As the global pandemic unfolded, government-funded…

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'Excess Mortality Skyrocketed': Tucker Carlson and Dr. Pierre Kory Unpack 'Criminal' COVID Response

As the global pandemic unfolded, government-funded experimental vaccines were hastily developed for a virus which primarily killed the old and fat (and those with other obvious comorbidities), and an aggressive, global campaign to coerce billions into injecting them ensued.

Then there were the lockdowns - with some countries (New Zealand, for example) building internment camps for those who tested positive for Covid-19, and others such as China welding entire apartment buildings shut to trap people inside.

It was an egregious and unnecessary response to a virus that, while highly virulent, was survivable by the vast majority of the general population.

Oh, and the vaccines, which governments are still pushing, didn't work as advertised to the point where health officials changed the definition of "vaccine" multiple times.

Tucker Carlson recently sat down with Dr. Pierre Kory, a critical care specialist and vocal critic of vaccines. The two had a wide-ranging discussion, which included vaccine safety and efficacy, excess mortality, demographic impacts of the virus, big pharma, and the professional price Kory has paid for speaking out.

Keep reading below, or if you have roughly 50 minutes, watch it in its entirety for free on X:

"Do we have any real sense of what the cost, the physical cost to the country and world has been of those vaccines?" Carlson asked, kicking off the interview.

"I do think we have some understanding of the cost. I mean, I think, you know, you're aware of the work of of Ed Dowd, who's put together a team and looked, analytically at a lot of the epidemiologic data," Kory replied. "I mean, time with that vaccination rollout is when all of the numbers started going sideways, the excess mortality started to skyrocket."

When asked "what kind of death toll are we looking at?", Kory responded "...in 2023 alone, in the first nine months, we had what's called an excess mortality of 158,000 Americans," adding "But this is in 2023. I mean, we've  had Omicron now for two years, which is a mild variant. Not that many go to the hospital."

'Safe and Effective'

Tucker also asked Kory why the people who claimed the vaccine were "safe and effective" aren't being held criminally liable for abetting the "killing of all these Americans," to which Kory replied: "It’s my kind of belief, looking back, that [safe and effective] was a predetermined conclusion. There was no data to support that, but it was agreed upon that it would be presented as safe and effective."

Carlson and Kory then discussed the different segments of the population that experienced vaccine side effects, with Kory noting an "explosion in dying in the youngest and healthiest sectors of society," adding "And why did the employed fare far worse than those that weren't? And this particularly white collar, white collar, more than gray collar, more than blue collar."

Kory also said that Big Pharma is 'terrified' of Vitamin D because it "threatens the disease model." As journalist The Vigilant Fox notes on X, "Vitamin D showed about a 60% effectiveness against the incidence of COVID-19 in randomized control trials," and "showed about 40-50% effectiveness in reducing the incidence of COVID-19 in observational studies."

Professional costs

Kory - while risking professional suicide by speaking out, has undoubtedly helped save countless lives by advocating for alternate treatments such as Ivermectin.

Kory shared his own experiences of job loss and censorship, highlighting the challenges of advocating for a more nuanced understanding of vaccine safety in an environment often resistant to dissenting voices.

"I wrote a book called The War on Ivermectin and the the genesis of that book," he said, adding "Not only is my expertise on Ivermectin and my vast clinical experience, but and I tell the story before, but I got an email, during this journey from a guy named William B Grant, who's a professor out in California, and he wrote to me this email just one day, my life was going totally sideways because our protocols focused on Ivermectin. I was using a lot in my practice, as were tens of thousands of doctors around the world, to really good benefits. And I was getting attacked, hit jobs in the media, and he wrote me this email on and he said, Dear Dr. Kory, what they're doing to Ivermectin, they've been doing to vitamin D for decades..."

"And it's got five tactics. And these are the five tactics that all industries employ when science emerges, that's inconvenient to their interests. And so I'm just going to give you an example. Ivermectin science was extremely inconvenient to the interests of the pharmaceutical industrial complex. I mean, it threatened the vaccine campaign. It threatened vaccine hesitancy, which was public enemy number one. We know that, that everything, all the propaganda censorship was literally going after something called vaccine hesitancy."

Money makes the world go 'round

Carlson then hit on perhaps the most devious aspect of the relationship between drug companies and the medical establishment, and how special interests completely taint science to the point where public distrust of institutions has spiked in recent years.

"I think all of it starts at the level the medical journals," said Kory. "Because once you have something established in the medical journals as a, let's say, a proven fact or a generally accepted consensus, consensus comes out of the journals."

"I have dozens of rejection letters from investigators around the world who did good trials on ivermectin, tried to publish it. No thank you, no thank you, no thank you. And then the ones that do get in all purportedly prove that ivermectin didn't work," Kory continued.

"So and then when you look at the ones that actually got in and this is where like probably my biggest estrangement and why I don't recognize science and don't trust it anymore, is the trials that flew to publication in the top journals in the world were so brazenly manipulated and corrupted in the design and conduct in, many of us wrote about it. But they flew to publication, and then every time they were published, you saw these huge PR campaigns in the media. New York Times, Boston Globe, L.A. times, ivermectin doesn't work. Latest high quality, rigorous study says. I'm sitting here in my office watching these lies just ripple throughout the media sphere based on fraudulent studies published in the top journals. And that's that's that has changed. Now that's why I say I'm estranged and I don't know what to trust anymore."

Vaccine Injuries

Carlson asked Kory about his clinical experience with vaccine injuries.

"So how this is how I divide, this is just kind of my perception of vaccine injury is that when I use the term vaccine injury, I'm usually referring to what I call a single organ problem, like pericarditis, myocarditis, stroke, something like that. An autoimmune disease," he replied.

"What I specialize in my practice, is I treat patients with what we call a long Covid long vaxx. It's the same disease, just different triggers, right? One is triggered by Covid, the other one is triggered by the spike protein from the vaccine. Much more common is long vax. The only real differences between the two conditions is that the vaccinated are, on average, sicker and more disabled than the long Covids, with some pretty prominent exceptions to that."

Watch the entire interview above, and you can support Tucker Carlson's endeavors by joining the Tucker Carlson Network here...

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/14/2024 - 16:20

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For-profit nursing homes are cutting corners on safety and draining resources with financial shenanigans − especially at midsize chains that dodge public scrutiny

Owners of midsize nursing home chains drain billions from facilities, hiding behind opaque accounting practices and harming the elderly as government,…

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on

The care at Landmark of Louisville Rehabilitation and Nursing was abysmal when state inspectors filed their survey report of the Kentucky facility on July 3, 2021.

Residents wandered the halls in a facility that can house up to 250 people, yelling at each other and stealing blankets. One resident beat a roommate with a stick, causing bruising and skin tears. Another was found in bed with a broken finger and a bloody forehead gash. That person was allowed to roam and enter the beds of other residents. In another case, there was sexual touching in the dayroom between residents, according to the report.

Meals were served from filthy meal carts on plastic foam trays, and residents struggled to cut their food with dull plastic cutlery. Broken tiles lined showers, and a mysterious black gunk marred the floors. The director of housekeeping reported that the dining room was unsanitary. Overall, there was a critical lack of training, staff and supervision.

The inspectors tagged Landmark as deficient in 29 areas, including six that put residents in immediate jeopardy of serious harm and three where actual harm was found. The issues were so severe that the government slapped Landmark with a fine of over $319,000more than 29 times the average for a nursing home in 2021 − and suspended payments to the home from federal Medicaid and Medicare funds.

This excerpt from the July 3, 2021, state inspection report of Landmark of Louisville Rehabilitation and Nursing includes an interview with a nurse who found an injured resident. New York State attorney general's office

Persistent problems

But problems persisted. Five months later, inspectors levied six additional deficiencies of immediate jeopardy − the highest level − including more sexual abuse among residents and a certified nursing assistant pushing someone down, bruising the person’s back and hip.

Landmark is just one of the 58 facilities run by parent company Infinity Healthcare Management across five states. The government issued penalties to the company almost 4½ times the national average, according to bimonthly data that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services first started to make available in late 2022. All told, Infinity paid nearly $10 million in fines since 2021, the highest among nursing home chains with fewer than 100 facilities.

Infinity Healthcare Management and its executives did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Such sanctions are nothing new for Infinity or other for-profit nursing home chains that have dominated an industry long known for cutting corners in pursuit of profits for private owners. But this race to the bottom to extract profits is accelerating despite demands by government officials, health care experts and advocacy groups to protect the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

To uncover the reasons why, The Conversation’s investigative unit Inquiry delved into the nursing home industry, where for-profit facilities make up more than 72% of the nation’s nearly 14,900 facilities. The probe, which paired an academic expert with an investigative reporter, used the most recent government data on ownership, facility information and penalties, combined with CMS data on affiliated entities for nursing homes.

The investigation revealed an industry that places a premium on cost cutting and big profits, with low staffing and poor quality, often to the detriment of patient well-being. Operating under weak and poorly enforced regulations with financially insignificant penalties, the for-profit sector fosters an environment where corners are frequently cut, compromising the quality of care and endangering patient health. Meanwhile, owners make the facilities look less profitable by siphoning money from the homes through byzantine networks of interconnected corporations. Federal regulators have neglected the problem as each year likely billions of dollars are funneled out of nursing homes through related parties and into owners’ pockets.

More trouble at midsize

Analyzing newly released government data, our investigation found that these problems are most pronounced in nursing homes like Infinity − midsize chains that operate between 11 and 100 facilities. This subsection of the industry has higher average fines per home, lower overall quality ratings, and are more likely to be tagged with resident abuse compared with both the larger and smaller networks. Indeed, while such chains account for about 39% of all facilities, they operate 11 of the 15 most-fined facilities.

With few impediments, private investors who own the midsize chains have quietly swooped in to purchase underperforming homes, expanding their holdings even further as larger chains divest and close facilities. As a result of the industry’s churn of facility ownership, over one fifth of the country’s nursing facilities changed ownership between 2016 and 2021, four times more changes than hospitals.

A 2023 report by Good Jobs First, a nonprofit watchdog, noted that a dozen of these chains in the midsize range have doubled or tripled in size while racking up fines averaging over $100,000 per facility since 2018. But unlike the large, multistate chains with easily recognizable names, the midsize networks slip through without the same level of public scrutiny, The Conversation’s investigations unit found.

“They are really bad, but the names − we don’t know these names,” said Toby Edelman, senior policy attorney with the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a nonprofit law organization.

“When we used to have those multistate chains, the facilities all had the same name, so you know what the quality is you’re getting,” she said. “It’s not that good − but at least you know what you’re getting.”

In response to The Conversation’s findings on nursing homes and request for an interview, a CMS spokesperson emailed a statement that said the CMS is “unwavering in its commitment to improve safety and quality of care for the more than 1.2 million residents receiving care in Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing homes.”

The statement pointed to data released by the oversight body on mergers, acquisitions, consolidations and changes of ownership in April 2023 along with additional ownership data released the following September. CMS also proposed a rule change that aims to increase transparency in nursing home ownership by collecting more information on facility owners and their affiliations.

“Our focus is on advancing implementable solutions that promote safe, high-quality care for residents and consider the challenging circumstances some long-term care facilities face,” the statement reads. “We believe the proposed requirements are achievable and necessary.”

CMS is slated to implement the disclosure rules in the fall and release the new data to the public later this year.

“We support transparency and accountability,” the American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living, a trade organization representing the nursing home industry, wrote in response to The Conversation‘s request for comment. “But neither ownership nor line items on a budget sheet prove whether a nursing home is committed to its residents. Over the decades, we’ve found that strong organizations tend to have supportive and trusted leadership as well as a staff culture that empowers frontline caregivers to think critically and solve problems. These characteristics are not unique to a specific type or size of provider.”

It often takes years to improve a poor nursing home − or run one into the ground. The analysis of midsize chains shows that most owners have been associated with their current facilities for less than eight years, making it difficult to separate operators who have taken long-term investments in resident care from those who are looking to quickly extract money and resources before closing them down or moving on. These chains control roughly 41% of nursing home beds in the U.S., according to CMS’s provider data, making the lack of transparency especially ripe for abuse.

A churn of nursing home purchases even during the COVID-19 pandemic shows that investors view the sector as highly profitable, especially when staffing costs are kept low and fines for poor care can easily be covered by the money extracted from residents, their families and taxpayers.

“This is the model of their care: They come in, they understaff and they make their money,” said Sam Brooks, director of public policy at the Consumer Voice, a national resident advocacy organization. “Then they multiply it over a series of different facilities.”

Side-by-side pictures of different nursing home residents asleep with their heads near dishes of food
These pictures showing residents asleep in their food appeared in the 2022 New York attorney general’s lawsuit against The Villages of Orleans Health and Rehabilitation Center in Albion, N.Y. New York State attorney general's office

Investor race

The explosion of a billion-dollar private marketplace found its beginnings in government spending.

The adoption of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 set loose a race among investors to load up on nursing homes, with a surge in for-profit homes gaining momentum because of a reliable stream of government payouts. By 1972, a mere seven years after the inception of the programs, a whopping 106 companies had rushed to Wall Street to sell shares in nursing home companies. And little wonder: They pulled in profits through their ownership of 18% of the industry’s beds, securing about a third of the hefty $3.2 billion of government cash.

The 1990s saw substantial expansion in for-profit nursing home chains, marked by a wave of acquisitions and mergers. At the same time, increasing difficulties emerged in the model for publicly traded chains. Shareholders increasingly demanded rapid growth, and researchers have found that the publicly traded chains tried to appease that hunger by reducing nursing staff and cutting corners on other measures meant to improve quality and safety.

“I began to suspect a possibly inherent contradiction between publicly traded and other large investor-operated nursing home companies and the prerequisites for quality care,” Paul R. Willging, former chief lobbyist for the industry, wrote in a 2007 letter to the editor of The New York Times. “For many investors … earnings growth, quarter after quarter, is often paramount. Long-term investments in quality can work at cross purposes with a mandate for an unending progression of favorable earnings reports.”

One example of that clash can be found at the Ensign Group, founded in 1999 as a private chain of five facilities. Using a strategy of acquiring struggling nursing homes, the company went public in 2007 with more than 60 facilities. What followed was a year-after-year acquisition binge and a track record of growing profits almost every year. Yet the company kept staffing levels below the national average and levels recommended by experts. Its facilities had higher than average inspection deficiencies and higher COVID infection rates. Since 2021, it has racked up more than $6.5 million in penalties.

Ensign did not respond to requests for comment.

Even with that kind of expense cutting, not all publicly traded nursing homes survived as the costs of providing poor care added up. Residents sued over mistreatment. Legal fees and settlements ate into profits, shareholders grumbled, and executives searched for a way out of this Catch-22.

Recognizing the long-term potential for profit growth, private investors snapped up publicly traded for-profit chains, reducing the previous levels of public transparency and oversight. Between 2000 and 2017, 1,674 nursing homes were acquired by private-equity firms in 128 unique deals out of 18,485 facilities. But the same poor-quality problems persisted. Research shows that after snagging a big chain, private investors tended to follow the same playbook: They rebrand the company, increase corporate control and dump unprofitable homes to other investment groups willing to take shortcuts for profit.

Multiple academic studies show the results, highlighting the lower staffing and quality in for-profit homes compared with nonprofits and government-run facilities. Elderly residents staying long term in nursing homes owned by private investment groups experienced a significant uptick in trips to the emergency department and hospitalizations between 2013 and 2017, translating into higher costs for Medicare.

Overall, private-equity investors wreak havoc on nursing homes, slashing registered nurse hours per resident day by 12%, outpacing other for-profit facilities. The aftermath is grim, with a daunting 14% surge in the deficiency score index, a standardized metric for determining issues with facilities, according to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report.

The human toll comes in death and suffering. A study updated in 2023 by the National Bureau of Economic Research calculated that 22,500 additional deaths over a 12-year span were attributable to private-equity ownership, equating to about 172,400 lost life years. The calculations also showed that private-equity ownership was responsible for a 6.2% reduction in mobility, an 8.5% increase in ulcer development and a 10.5% uptick in pain intensity.

Hiding in complexity

Exposing the identities of who should be held responsible for such anguish poses a formidable task. Private investors in nursing home chains often employ a convoluted system of limited liability corporations, related companies and family relationships to obscure who controls the nursing homes.

These adjustments are crafted to minimize liability, capitalize on favorable tax policies, diminish regulatory scrutiny and disguise nursing home profitability. In this investigation, entities at every level of involvement with a nursing home denied ownership, even though the same people controlled each organization.

A rule put in place in 2023 by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services requires the identification of all private-equity and real estate investment trust investors in a facility and the release of all related party names. But this hasn’t been enough to surface the players and relationships. More than half of ownership data provided to CMS is incomplete across all facilities, according to a March 2024 analysis of the newly released data.

Complicated graphic with 21 intertwined items
Nursing home investors drained more than $18 million out of a single facility through a complex web of related party transactions. New York State attorney general's office

Even the land under the nursing home is often owned by someone else. In 2021, publicly traded or private real estate investment trusts held a sizable chunk of the approximately $120 billion of nursing home real estate. As with homes owned by private-equity investors, quality measures collapse after REITs get involved, with facilities witnessing a 7% decline in registered nurses’ hours per resident day and an alarming 14% ascent in the deficiency score index. It’s a blatant pattern of disruption, leaving facilities and care standards in a dire state.

Part of that quality collapse comes from the way these investment entities make their money. REITs and their owners can drain cash out of the nursing homes in a number of different ways. The standard tactic for grabbing the money is known as a triple-net lease, where the REIT buys the property then leases it back to the nursing home, often at exorbitant rates. Although the nursing home then lacks possession of the property, it still gets slammed with costs typically shouldered by an owner − real estate taxes, insurance, maintenance and more. Topping it off, the facilities then must typically pay annual rent hikes.

A second tactic that REITs use involves a contracting façade that serves no purpose other than enriching the owners of the trusts. Since triple-net lease agreements prohibit REITs from taking profits from operating the facilities, the investors create a subsidiary to get past that hurdle. The subsidiary then contracts with a nursing home operator − often owned or controlled by another related party − and then demands a fee for providing operational guidance. The use of REITs for near-risk-free profits from nursing homes has proven to be an ever-growing technique, and the midsize chains, which our investigation found generally provided the worst care, grew in their reliance on REITs during the pandemic.

“When these REITs start coming in … nursing homes are saddled with these enormous rents, and then they wind up going out of business,” said Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long-Term Care Community Coalition, a nonprofit organization that advocates for better care at nursing homes. “It’s no longer a viable facility.”

The churn of nursing home purchases by midsize chains underscores investors’ perception of the sector’s profitability, particularly when staffing expenses are minimized and penalties for subpar care can be offset by money extracted through related transactions and payments from residents, their families and taxpayers. Lawsuits can drag out over years, and in the worst case, if a facility is forced to close, its land and other assets can be sold to minimize the financial loss.

Take Brius Healthcare, a name that resonates with a disturbing cadence in the world of nursing home ownership. A search of the federal database for nursing home ownership and penalties shows that Brius was responsible for 32 facilities as of the start of 2024, but the true number is closer to 80, according to BriusWatch.org, which tracks violations. At the helm of this still midsize network stands Shlomo Rechnitz, who became a billionaire in part by siphoning from government payments to his facilities scattered across California, according to a federal and state lawsuit.

In lawsuits and regulators’ criticisms, Rechnitz’s homes have been associated with tales of abuse, as well as several lawsuits alleging terrible care. The track record was so bad that, in the summer of 2014, then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris filed an emergency motion to block Rechnitz from acquiring 19 facilities, writing that he was “a serial violator of rules within the skilled nursing industry” and was “not qualified to assume such an important role.”

Yet, Rechnitz’s empire in California surged forward, scooping up more facilities that drained hundreds of millions of federal and state funds as they racked up pain and profit. The narrative played out at Windsor Redding Care Center in Redding, California. Rechnitz bought it from a competing nursing home chain and attempted to obtain a license to operate the facility. But in 2016, the California Department of Public Health refused the application, citing a staggering 265 federal regulatory violations across his other nursing homes over just three years.

According to court filings, Rechnitz formed a joint venture with other investors who in turn held the license. Rechnitz, through the Brius joint venture, became the unlicensed owner and operator of Windsor Redding.

Brius carved away at expenses, slashing staff and other care necessities, according to a 2022 California lawsuit. One resident was left to sit in her urine and feces for hours at a time. Overwhelmed staff often did not respond to her call light, so once she instead climbed out of bed unassisted, fell and fractured her hip. Other negligence led to pressure ulcers, and when she was finally transferred to a hospital, she was suffering from sepsis. She was not alone in her suffering. Numerous other residents experienced an unrelenting litany of injuries and illnesses, including pressure ulcers, urinary tract infections from poor hygiene, falls, and skin damage from excess moisture, according to the lawsuit.

In 2023, California moved forward with licensing two dozen of Rechnitz’s facilities with an agreement that included a two-year monitoring period, right before statewide reforms were set to take effect. The reforms don’t prevent existing owners like Rechnitz from continuing to run a nursing home without a license, but they do prevent new operators from doing so.

“We’re seeing more of that, I think, where you have a proliferation of really bad operators that keep being provided homes,” said Brooks, the director of public policy at the Consumer Voice. “There’s just so much money to be made here for unscrupulous people, and it just happens all the time.”

Rechnitz did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Bruis also did not respond.

Perhaps no other chain showcases the havoc that can be caused by one individual’s acquisition of multiple nursing homes than Skyline Health Care. The company’s owner, Joseph Schwartz, parlayed the sale of his insurance business into ownership of 90 facilities between mid-2016 and December 2017, according to a federal indictment. He ran the company out of an office above a New Jersey pizzeria and at its peak managed facilities in 11 states.

Schwartz went all-in on cost cutting, and by early 2018, residents were suffering from the shortage of staff. The company wasn’t paying its bills or its workers. More than a dozen lawsuits piled up. Last year, Schwartz was arrested and faced charges in federal district court in New Jersey for his role in a $38 million payroll tax scheme. In 2024, Schwartz pleaded guilty to his role in the fraud scheme. He is awaiting sentencing, where he faces a year in prison along with paying at least $5 million in restitution.

Skyline collapsed and disrupted thousands of lives. Some states took over facilities; others closed, forcing residents to relocate and throwing families into chaos. The case also highlights the ease with which some bad operators can snap up nursing homes with little difficulty, with federal and state governments allowing ownership changes with little or no review.

Schwartz’s lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.

Not that nursing homes have much to fear in the public perception of their reputation for quality. CMS uses what is known as the Five-Star Quality Rating System, designed to help consumers compare nursing homes to find one that provides good care. Theoretically, nursing homes with five-star ratings are supposed to be exceptional, while those with one-star ratings are deemed the worst. But research shows that nursing homes can game the system, with the result that a top star rating might reflect little more than a facility’s willingness to cheat.

A star rating is composed of three parts: The score from a government inspection and the facility’s self-reports of staffing and quality. This means that what the nursing homes say about themselves can boost the star rating of facilities even if they have poor inspection results.

Multiple studies have highlighted a concerning trend: Some nursing homes, especially for-profit ones, inflate their self-reported measures, resulting in a disconnect from actual inspection findings. Notably, research suggests that for-profit nursing homes, driven by significant financial motives, are more likely to engage in this practice of inflating their self-reported assessments.

At bottom, the elderly and their families seeking quality care unknowingly find themselves in an impossible situation with for-profit nursing homes: Those facilities tend to provide the worst quality, and the only measure available for consumers to determine where they will be treated well can be rigged. The result is the transformation of an industry meant to care for the most vulnerable into a profit-driven circus.

Close-up of an elderly woman's head leaning on her hand
The for-profit nursing home sector is growing, and it places a premium on cost cutting and big profits, which has led to low staffing and patient neglect and mistreatment. picture alliance via Getty Images

The pandemic

Nothing more clearly exposed the problems rampant in nursing homes than the pandemic. Throughout that time, nursing homes reported that almost 2 million residents had infections and 170,000 died.

No one should have been surprised by the mass death in nursing homes − the warning signs of what was to come had been visible for years. Between 2013 and 2017, infection control was the most frequently cited deficiency in nursing homes, with 40% of facilities cited each year and 82% cited at least once in the five-year period. Almost half were cited over multiple consecutive years for these deficiencies − if fixed, one of the big causes of the widespread transmission of COVID in these facilities would have been eliminated.

But shortly after coming into office in 2017, the Trump administration weakened what was already a deteriorating system to regulate nursing homes. The administration directed regulators to issue one-time fines against nursing homes for violations of federal rules rather than for the full time they were out of compliance. This shift meant that even nursing homes with severe infractions lasting weeks were exempted from fines surpassing the maximum per-instance penalty of $20,965.

Even that near-worthless level of regulation was not feeble enough for the industry, so lobbyists pressed for less. In response, just a few months before COVID emerged in China, the Trump administration implemented new regulations that effectively abolished a mandate for each to hire a full-time infection control expert, instead recommending outside consultants for the job.

The perfect storm had been reached, with no experts required to be on site, prepared to combat any infection outbreaks. On Jan. 20, 2020 − just 186 days after the change in rules on infection control − the CDC reported that the first laboratory-confirmed case of COVID had been found at a nursing home in Washington state.

The least prepared in this explosion of disease were the for-profit nursing homes, compared with nonprofit and government facilities. Research from the University of California at San Francisco found those facilities were linked to higher numbers of COVID cases. For-profits not only had fewer nurses on staff but also high numbers of infection-control deficiencies and lower compliance with health regulations.

Even as the United States went through the crisis, some owners of midsize chains continued snapping up nursing homes. For example, two Brooklyn businessmen named Simcha Hyman and Naftali Zanziper were going on a nursing home buying spree through their private-equity company, the Portopiccolo Group. Despite poor ratings in their previously owned facilities, nothing blocked the acquisitions.

One such facility was a struggling nursing home in North Carolina now known as The Citadel Salisbury. Following the traditional pattern forged by private investors in the industry, the new owners set up a convoluted network of business entities and then used them to charge the nursing home for services and property. A 2021 federal lawsuit of many plaintiffs claimed that they deliberately kept the facility understaffed and undersupplied to maximize profit.

Within months of the first case of COVID reported in America, The Citadel Salisbury experienced the largest nursing home outbreak in the state. The situation was so dire that on April 20, 2020, the local medical director of the emergency room took to the local newspaper to express his distress, revealing that he had pressed the facility’s leadership and the local health department to address the known shortcomings.

The situation was “a blueprint for exactly what not to do in a crisis,” medical director John Bream wrote. “Patients died at the Citadel without family members being notified. Families were denied the ability to have one last meaningful interaction with their family. Employees were wrongly denied personal protective equipment. There has been no transparency.”

After a series of scathing inspection reports, the facility finally closed in the spring of 2022. As for the federal lawsuit, court documents show that a tentative agreement was reached in 2023. But the case dragged out for nearly three years, and one of the plaintiffs, Sybil Rummage, died while seeking accountability through the court.

Still, the pandemic had been a time of great success for Hyman and Zanziper. At the end of 2020, they owned more than 70 facilities. By 2021, their portfolio had exploded to more than 120. Now, according to data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Hyman and Zanziper are associated with at least 131 facilities and have the highest amount of total fines recorded by the agency for affiliated entities, totaling nearly $12 million since 2021. And their average fine per facility, as calculated by CMS, is more than twice the national average at almost $90,000.

In a written statement, Portopiccolo Group spokesperson John Collins disputed that the facilities had skimped on care and argued that they were not managed by the firm. “We hire experienced, local health care teams who are in charge of making all on-the-ground decisions and are committed to putting residents first.” He added that the number of facilities given by CMS was inaccurate but declined to say how many are connected to its network of affiliates or owned by Hyman and Zanziper.

With the nearly 170,000 resident deaths from COVID and many related fatalities from isolation and neglect in nursing homes, in February 2022 President Biden announced an initiative aimed at improving the industry. In addition to promising to set a minimum staffing standard, the initiative is focused on improving ownership and financial transparency.

“As Wall Street firms take over more nursing homes, quality in those homes has gone down and costs have gone up. That ends on my watch,” Biden said during his 2022 State of the Union address. “Medicare is going to set higher standards for nursing homes and make sure your loved ones get the care they deserve and expect.”

President Biden sitting at a desk signing with a crowd gathered around him
President Joe Biden signed an executive order on April 18, 2023, that directed the secretary of health and human services to consider actions that would build on nursing home minimum staffing standards and improve staff retention. Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Still, the current trajectory of actions appears to fall short of what’s needed. While penalties against facilities have sharply increased under Biden, some of the Trump administration’s weak regulations have not been replaced.

A rule proposed by CMS in September 2023 and released for review in March 2024 would require states to report what percentage of Medicaid funding is used to pay direct care workers and support staff and would require an RN on duty 24/7. It would also require a minimum of three hours of skilled staffing care per patient per day. But the three-hour minimum is substantially lower than the 4.1 hours of skilled staffing for nursing home residents suggested by CMS over two decades ago.

The requirements are also lower than the 3.8 average nursing staff hours already employed by U.S. facilities.

The current administration has also let stand the Trump administration reversal of an Obama rule that banned binding arbitration agreements in nursing homes.

It breaks a village

The Villages of Orleans Health and Rehabilitation Center in Albion, New York, was, by any reasonable measure, broken. Court records show that on some days there was no nurse and no medication for the more than 100 elderly residents. Underpaid staff spent their own cash for soap to keep residents clean. At times, the home didn’t feed its frail occupants.

Meanwhile, according to a 2022 lawsuit filed by the New York attorney general, riches were siphoned out of the nursing home and into the pockets of the official owner, Bernard Fuchs, as well as assorted friends, business associates and family. The lawsuit says $18.7 million flowed from the facility to entities owned by a group of men who controlled the Village’s operations.

Although these men own various nursing homes, Medicare records show few connections between them, despite them all being investors in Comprehensive Healthcare Management, which provided administrative services to the Villages. Either they or their families were also owners of Telegraph Realty, which leased what was once the Villages’ own property back to the facility at rates the New York attorney general deemed exorbitant, predatory and a sham.

So it goes in the world of nursing home ownership, where overlapping entities and investors obscure the interrelationships between them to such a degree that Medicare itself is never quite sure who owns what.

Glenn Jones, a lawyer representing Comprehensive Healthcare Management, declined to comment on the pending litigation, but he forwarded a court document his law firm filed that labels the allegations brought by the New York attorney general “unfounded” and reliant on “a mere fraction” of its residents.

Side-by-side pictures of a man in a wheelchair with glasses in November, 2019 and the same man looking less alert, unshaven and with an eye wound in December, 2019
These pictures of the same resident one month apart at the Holliswood Center for Rehabilitation and Healthcare in Queens appeared in a 2023 New York attorney general lawsuit against 13 LLCs and 14 individuals. The group owns multiple nursing homes and allegedly neglected residents, while owners siphoned Medicare and Medicaid money into their own pockets. New York attorney general's office

The shadowy structure of ownership and related party transactions plays an enormous role in how investors enrich themselves, even as the nursing homes they control struggle financially. Compounding the issue, the figures reported by nursing homes regarding payments to related parties frequently diverge from the disclosures made by the related parties themselves.

As an illustration of the problems, consider Pruitt Health, a midsize chain with 87 nursing homes spread across Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Florida that had low overall federal quality ratings and about $2 million in penalties. A report by The National Consumer Voice For Quality Long-Term Care, a consumer advocacy group, shows that Pruitt disclosed general related party costs nearing $482 million from 2018 to 2020. Yet in that same time frame, Pruitt reported payments to specific related parties amounting to about $570 million, indicating a $90 million excess. Its federal disclosures offer no explanation for the discrepancy. Meanwhile, the company reported $77 million in overall losses on its homes.

The same pattern holds in the major chains such as the Cleveland, Tennessee-based Life Care Centers of America, which operates roughly 200 nursing homes across 27 states, according to the report. Life Care’s financial disbursements are fed into a diverse spectrum of related entities, including management, staffing, insurance and therapy companies, all firmly under the umbrella of the organization’s ownership. In fiscal year 2018, the financial commitment to these affiliated entities reached $386,449,502; over the three-year period from 2018 to 2020, Life Care’s documented payments to such parties hit an eye-popping $1.25 billion.

Pruitt Health and Life Care Centers did not respond to requests for comment.

Overall, 77% of US nursing homes reported $11 billion in related-party transactions in 2019 − nearly 10% of total net revenues − but the data is unaudited and unverified. The facilities are not required to provide any details of what specific services were provided by the related parties, or what were the specific profits and administrative costs, creating a lack of transparency regarding expenses that are ambiguously categorized under generic labels such as “maintenance.” Significantly, there is no mandate to disclose whether any of these costs exceed fair market value.

What that means is that nursing home owners can profit handsomely through related parties even if their facilities are being hit with repeated fines for providing substandard care.

“What we would consider to be a big penalty really doesn’t matter because there’s so much money coming in,” said Mollot of the Long-Term Care Community Coalition. “If the facility fails, so what? It doesn’t matter. They pulled out the resources.’’

Hiding profit

Ultimately, experts say, this ability to drain cash out of nursing homes makes it almost impossible for anyone to assess the profitability of these facilities based on their public financial filings, known as cost reports.

"The profit margins (for nursing homes) also should be taken with a grain of salt in the cost reports,” said Dr. R. Tamara Konetzka, a University of Chicago professor of public health sciences, at a recent meeting of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. “If you sell the real estate to a REIT or to some other entity, and you pay sort of inflated rent back to make your profit margins look lower, and then you recoup that profit because it’s a related party, we’re not going to find that in the cost reports.”

That ability to hide profits is key to nursing homes’ ability to block regulations to improve quality of care and to demand greater government payments. For decades, the industry’s refrain has been that cuts in reimbursements or requirements to increase staffing will drive facilities into bankruptcy; already, they claim, half of all nursing homes are teetering on the edge of collapse, the result, they say, of inadequate Medicaid rates. All in all, the industry reports that less than 3% of their revenue goes to earnings.

But that does not include any of the revenue pulled out of the homes to boost profits of related parties controlled by the same owners pleading poverty. And this tactic is only one of several ways that the nursing home industry disguises its true profits, giving it the power to plead poverty to an unknowing government.

Under the regulations, only certain nursing home expenses are reimbursable, such as money spent for care. Many others − unreasonable payments to the headquarters of chains, luxury items, and fees for lobbyists and lawyers − are disallowed after Medicare reviews the cost reports. But by that time, the government has already reimbursed the nursing homes for those expenses − and none of those revenues have to be returned.

Data indicates that owners also profit by overcharging nursing homes for services and leases provided by related entities. A March 2024 study from Lehigh University and the University of California, Los Angeles shows that costs were inflated when nursing home owners changed from independent contractors to businesses owned or controlled directly or indirectly by the same people. Overall, spending on real estate increased 20.4%, and spending on management increased 24.6% when the businesses were affiliated, the research showed.

Nursing homes also claim that noncash depreciation cuts into their profits. Those expenses, which show up only in accounting ledgers, assume that assets such as equipment and facilities are gradually decreasing in value and ultimately will need to be replaced.

That might be reasonable if the chains purchased new items once their value depreciated to zero, but that is not always true. A 2004 report by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission found that the depreciation claimed by health care companies, including nursing homes, may not reflect actual capital expenditures or the actual market value.

If disallowed expenses and noncash depreciation were not included, profit margins for the nursing home industry would jump to 8.8%, far more than the 3% it claims. And given that these numbers all come from nursing home cost reports submitted to the government, they may underestimate the profits even more. Audited cost reports are not required, and the Government Accountability Office has found that CMS does little to ensure the numbers are correct and complete.

This lack of basic oversight essentially gives dishonest nursing home owners the power to grab more money from Medicare and Medicaid while being empowered to claim that their financials prove they need more.

“They face no repercussions,” Brooks of Consumer Voice said, commenting on the current state of nursing home operations and their unscrupulous owners. “That’s why these people are here. It’s a bonanza to them.”

Ultimately, experts say, finding ways to force nursing homes to provide quality care has remained elusive. Michael Gelder, former senior health policy adviser to then-Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois, learned that brutal lesson in 2010 as head of a task force formed by Quinn to investigate nursing home quality. That group successfully pushed a new law, but Gelder now says his success failed to protect this country’s most vulnerable citizens.

“I was perhaps naively convinced that someone like myself being in the right place at the right time with enough resources could really fix this problem,” he said. “I think we did the absolute best we could, and the best that had ever been done in modern history up to that point. But it wasn’t enough. It’s a battle every generation has to fight.”

Click here to learn more about how some existing tools can address problems with for-profit nursing homes.

Sean Campbell is an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University and a contributing writer at the Garrison Project, an independent news organization that focuses on mass incarceration and criminal justice.

Harrington is an advisory board member of the nonprofit Veteran's Health Policy Institute and a board member of the nonprofit Center for Health Information and Policy. Harrington served as an expert witness on nursing home litigation cases by residents against facilities owned or operated by Brius and Shlomo Rechnitz in the past and in 2022. She also served as an expert witness in a case against The Citadel Salisbury in North Carolina in 2021.

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