Spread & Containment
The Euro’s Death Wish
The Euro’s Death Wish
Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,
Last week’s Goldmoney article explained the Fed’s increasing commitment to dollar hyperinflation. This week’s article examines the additional issues facing the…
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Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,
Last week’s Goldmoney article explained the Fed’s increasing commitment to dollar hyperinflation. This week’s article examines the additional issues facing the euro and the Eurozone.
More nakedly than is evidenced by other major central banks, the ECB through its system of satellite national central banks is now almost solely committed to financing national government debts and smothering over the consequences. The result is a commercial banking system both highly leveraged and burdened with overvalued government debt secured only by an implied ECB guarantee.
The failings of this statist control system have been covered up by a pass-the-parcel any collateral goes €10 trillion plus repo market, which with the TARGET2 settlement system has concealed the progressive accumulation of private sector bad debts ever since the first Eurozone crisis hit Spain in 2012.
These distortions can only continue so long as interest rates are suppressed beneath the zero bound. But rising interest rates globally are now a certainty — only officially unrecognised by central bankers — so there can only be two major consequences. First, the inevitable Eurozone economic recession (now being given an extra push through renewed covid restrictions) will send debt-burdened government deficits which are already high soaring, requiring an accelerated pace of inflationary financing by the ECB. And second, the collapse of the bloated repo market, which is to be avoided at all costs, will almost certainly be triggered.
This article attempts to clarify these issues. It is hardly surprising that for the ECB raising interest rates is not an option. Therefore, the recent weakness of the euro on the foreign exchanges marks only the start of a threat to the euro system, the outcome of which will be decided by the markets, not the ECB.
Introduction
The euro, as it is said of the camel, was designed by a committee. Unlike the ship of the desert the euro and its institutions will not survive — we can say that with increasing certainty considering current developments. Instead of evolving as demanded by its users, the euro has become even more of a state control mechanism than the other major currencies, with the exception, perhaps, of China’s renminbi. But for all its faults, the Chinese state at least pays attention to the economic demands of its citizens to guide it in its management of the currency. The commissars in Brussels along with national politicians seem to be blind to the social and economic consequences of drifting into totalitarianism, where people are forced into new lockdowns and in some cases are being forced into mandatory covid vaccinations.
The ECB in Frankfurt has also ignored the economic consequences of its actions and has just two priorities intact from its inception: to finance member governments by inflationary means and to suppress or ignore all evidence of the consequences.
The ECB’s founding was not auspicious. Before monetary union socialistic France relied on inflationary financing of government spending while Germany did not. The French state was interventionist while Germany fostered its mittelstand with sound money. The compromise was that the ECB would be in Frankfurt (the locational credibility argument won the day) while its first true president, after Wim Duisenberg oversaw its establishment and cut short his presidency, would be French: Jean-Claude Trichet. Membership qualifications for the Eurozone were set out in the Maastricht treaty, and then promptly ignored to let in Italy. They were ignored again to let in Greece, which in terms of ease of doing business ranked lower than both Jamaica and Columbia at the time. And now the Maastricht rules are ignored by everyone.
Following the establishment of the ECB the EU made no attempt to tackle the divergence between fiscally responsible Germany with similarly conservative northern states, and the spendthrift southern PIGS. Indeed, many claimed a virtue in that Germany’s savings could be deployed for the benefit of investment in less advanced member nations, a belief insufficiently addressed by the Germans at the time. The ECB presided over the rapidly expanding balance sheets of the major banks which in the early days of the euro made them fortunes arbitraging between Germany’s and the PIGs’ converging bond yields. The ECB was seemingly oblivious to the rapid balance sheet expansion with which came risks spiralling out of control. To be fair, the ECB was not the only major central bank unaware of what was happening on the banking scene ahead of the great financial crisis, but that does not absolve it from responsibility.
The ECB and its banking regulator (the European Banking Authority — EBA) has done nothing since the Lehman failure to reduce banking risk. Figure 1 shows current leverages for the Eurozone’s global systemically important banks, the G-SIBs. Doubtless, there are other lesser Eurozone banks with even higher balance sheet ratios, the failure of any of which threatens the Eurosystem itself.
Even these numbers don’t tell the whole story. Most of the credit expansion has been into government debt aided and abetted by Basel regulations, which rank government debt as the least risky balance sheet asset, irrespective whether it is German or Italian. Throughout the PIGS, private sector bad debts have been rated as “performing” by national regulators so that they can be used as collateral against loans and repurchase agreements, depositing them into the amorphous TARGET2 settlement system and upon other unwary counterparties.
Figure 2 shows the growth of M1 narrow money, which has admittedly not been as dramatic as in the US dollar’s M1. But the translation of bank lending into circulating currency in the Eurozone is by way of government borrowing without stimulation cheques. It is still progressing, Cantillon-like, through the monetary statistics. And they will almost certainly increase substantially further on the back of the ongoing covid pandemic, as state spending rises, tax revenues fall, and budget deficits soar. Bear in mind that the new covid lockdowns currently being implemented will knock the recent anaemic recovery firmly on the head and drive the Eurozone into a new slump. There can be no doubt that M1 for the euro area is set to increase significantly from here, particularly since the ECB is now nakedly a machine for inflationary financing.
In the US’s case, rising interest rates, which the Fed is keen to avoid, will undermine the US stock market with knock-on economic effects. In the Eurozone, rising interest rates will undermine spendthrift governments and the entire commercial banking system.
Government debt creation out of control
The table below shows government spending for leading Eurozone states as a proportion of their GDP last year, ranked from highest government spending to GDP to lowest (column 1). The US is included for comparison.
Some of the increase in government spending relative to their economies was due to significant falls in GDP, and some of it due to increased spending. The current year has seen a recovery in GDP, which will have not yet led to a general improvement in tax revenues, beyond sales taxes. And now, much of Europe faces new covid restrictions and lockdowns which are emasculating any hopes of stabilising government debt levels.
The final column in the table adjusts government debt to show it relative to the tax base, which is the productive private sector upon which all government spending, including borrowing costs and much of inflationary financing, depends. This is a more important measure than the commonly quoted debt to GDP ratios in the second column. The sensitivity to and importance of maintaining tax income becomes readily apparent and informs us that government debt to private sector GDP is potentially catastrophic. As well as the private sectors’ own tax burden, through their taxes and currency debasement they are having to support far larger obligations than generally realised. Productive citizens who don’t feel they are on a treadmill going ever faster for no purpose are lacking awareness.
These are the dynamics of national debt traps which only miss one element to trigger them: rising interest rates. Instead, they are being heavily suppressed by the ECB’s deposit rate of minus 0.5%. The market is so distorted that the nominal yield on France’s 5-year bond is minus 0.45%. In other words, a nation with a national debt that is so high as to be impossible to stabilise without the necessary political will to do so is being paid to borrow. Greece’s 5-year bond yields a paltry 0.48% and Italy’s 0.25%. Welcome to the mad, mad world of Eurozone government finances.
The ECB’s policy failure
It is therefore unsurprising that the ECB is resisting interest rate increases despite producer and consumer price inflation taking off. Consumer price inflation across the Eurozone is most recently recorded at 4.1%, making the real yield on Germany’s 5-year bond minus 4.67%. But Germany’s producer prices for October rose 18.4% compared with a year ago. There can be no doubt that producer prices will feed into consumer prices, and that rising consumer prices have much further to go, fuelled by the acceleration of currency debasement in recent years.
Therefore, in real terms, not only are negative rates already increasing, but they will go even further into record territory due to rising producer and consumer prices. It is also the consequence of all major central banks’ accelerated expansion of their base currencies, particularly since March 2020. Unless it abandons the euro to its fate on the foreign exchanges altogether, the ECB will be forced to raise its deposit rate very soon, to offset the euro’s depreciation. And given the sheer scale of previous monetary expansion, which is driving its loss of purchasing power, euro interest rates will have to rise considerably to have any stabilising effect.
But even if they increased only into modestly positive territory, the ECB would have to quicken the pace of its monetary creation just to keep Eurozone member governments afloat. The foreign exchanges will quickly recognise the situation, punishing the euro if the ECB fails to raise rates and punishing it if it does. But it won’t be limited to cross rates against other currencies, which to varying degrees face similar dilemmas, but measured against prices for commodities and essential products. Arguably, the euro’s rerating on the foreign exchanges has already commenced.
The ECB is being forced into an impossible situation of its own making. Bond yields have started to rise or become less negative, threatening to bankrupt the whole Eurozone network as the trend continues, and inflicting mark-to-market losses on highly leveraged commercial banks invested in government bonds. Furthermore, the Euro system’s network of national central banks is like a basket of rotten apples. It is the consequence not just of a flawed system, but of policies first introduced to rescue Spain from soaring bond yields in 2012. That was when Mario Draghi, the ECB’s President at the time said he was ready to do whatever it takes to save the euro, adding, “Believe me, it will be enough”.
It was then and its demise was deferred. The threat of intervention was enough to drive Spanish bond yields down (currently minus 0.24% on the 5-year bond!) and is probably behind the complacent thinking in the ECB to this day. But as the other bookend to Draghi’s promise to deploy bond purchasing programmes, Lagarde’s current intervention policy is of necessity far larger and more destabilising. And then there is the market problem: the ECB now acts as if it can ignore it for ever.
It wasn’t always like this. The euro started with the promise of being a far more stable currency replacement for national currencies, particularly the Italian lira, the Spanish peseta, the French franc, and the Greek drachma. But the first president of the ECB, Wim Duisenberg, resigned halfway during his term to make way for Jean-Claude Trichet, who was a French statist from the École Nationale d’Administration and a career civil servant. His was a political appointment, promoted by the French on a mixture of nationalism and a determination to neutralise the sound money advocates in Germany. To be fair to Trichet, he resisted some of the more overt pressures for inflationism. But then things had not yet started to go wrong on his watch.
Following Trichet, the ECB has pursued increasingly inflationist policies. Unlike the Bundesbank which closely monitored the money supply and paid attention to little else, the ECB adopted a wide range of economic indicators, allowing it to shift its focus from money to employment, confidence polls, long-term interest rates, output measures and others, allowing a fully flexible attitude to money. The ECB is now intensely political, masquerading as an independent monetary institution. But there is no question that it is subservient to Brussels and whose primary purpose is to ensure Eurozone governments’ profligate spending is always financed; “whatever it takes”. The private sector is now a distant irrelevance, only an alternative source of government revenue to inflation, the delegated responsibility of compliant national central banks, who take their orders from the economically remote ECB.
It is an arrangement that will eventually collapse through currency debasement and economic breakdown. Prices rising to multiples of the official CPI target and the necessary abandonment by the ECB of the euro in the foreign exchanges in favour of interest rate suppression now threaten the ability of the ECB to finance in perpetuity increasing government deficits.
The ECB, TARGET2 and the repo market
Figure 3 shows how the Eurozone’s central bank balance sheets have grown since the great financial crisis. The growth has virtually matched that of the Fed, increasing to $9.7 trillion equivalent against the Fed’s $8.5 trillion, but from a base about $700bn higher.
While they are reflected in central bank assets, TARGET2 imbalances are an additional complication, which are shown in the Osnabrück University chart reproduced in Figure 4. Points to note are that Germany is owed €1,067bn. The ECB collectively owes the national central banks (NCBs) €364bn. Italy owes €519bn, Spain €487bn and Portugal €82bn.
The effect of the ECB deficit, which arises from bond purchases conducted on its behalf by the national central banks, is to artificially reduce the TARGET2 balances of debtors in the system to the extent the ECB has bought their government bonds and not paid the relevant national central bank for them.
The combined debts of Italy and Spain to the other national central banks is about €1 trillion. In theory, these imbalances should not exist. The fact that they do and that from 2015 they have been increasing is due partly to accumulating bad debts, particularly in Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain. Local regulators are incentivised to declare non-performing bank loans as performing, so that they can be used as collateral for repurchase agreements with the local central bank and other counterparties. This has the effect of reducing non-performing loans at the national level, encouraging the view that there is no bad debt problem. But much of it has merely been removed from national banking systems and lost in both the euro system and the wider repo market.
Demand for collateral against which to obtain liquidity has led to significant monetary expansion, with the repo market acting not as a marginal liquidity management tool as is the case in other banking systems, but as an accumulating supply of raw money. This is shown in Figure 4, which is the result of an ICMA survey of 58 leading institutions in the euro system.
The total for this form of short-term financing grew to €8.31 trillion in outstanding contracts by December 2019. The collateral includes everything from government bonds and bills to pre-packaged commercial bank debt. According to the ICMA survey, double counting, whereby repos are offset by reverse repos, is minimal. This is important when one considers that a reverse repo is the other side of a repo, so that with repos being additional to the reverse repos recorded, the sum of the two is a valid measure of the size of the market outstanding. The value of repos transacted with central banks as part of official monetary policy operations were not included in the survey and continue to be “very substantial”. But repos with central banks in the ordinary course of financing are included.
Today, even excluding central bank repos connected with monetary policy operations, this figure probably exceeds €10 trillion, allowing for the underlying growth in this market and when one includes participants beyond the 58 dealers in the survey. An interesting driver of this market is negative interest rates, which means that the repayment of the cash side of a repo (and of a reverse repo) can be less than its initial payment. By tapping into central bank cash through a repo it gives a commercial bank a guaranteed return. This must be one reason that the repo market in euros has grown to be considerably larger than it is in the US.
This consideration raises the question as to the consequences of the ECB’s deposit rate being forced back into positive territory. It is likely to substantially reduce a source of balance sheet funding for commercial banks as repos from national central banks no longer offer negative rate funding. They would then be forced to sell balance sheet assets, which would drive all negative bond yields into positive territory, and higher. Furthermore, the contraction of bank credit implied by the withdrawal of repo finance will almost certainly have the knock-on effect of triggering a widespread banking liquidity crisis in a banking cohort with such high balance sheet gearing.
There is a further issue over collateral quality. While the US Fed only accepts very high-quality securities as repo collateral, with the Eurozone’s national banks and the ECB almost anything is accepted — it had to be when Greece and other PIGS were bailed out. High quality debt represents most of the repo collateral and commercial banks can take it back onto their balance sheets. But the hidden bailouts of Italian banks by taking dodgy loans off their books could not continue to this day without them being posted as repo collateral rolled into the TARGET2 system and into the wider commercial repo network.
The result is that the repos that will not be renewed by commercial counterparties are those whose collateral is bad or doubtful. We have no knowledge how much is involved. But given the incentive for national regulators to have deemed them creditworthy so that they could act as repo collateral, the amounts will be considerable. Having accepted this dodgy collateral, national central banks will be unable to reject them for fear of triggering a banking crisis in their own jurisdictions. Furthermore, they are likely to be forced to accept additional repo collateral rejected by commercial counterparties.
In short, in the bloated repo market there are the makings of the next Eurozone banking crisis. The numbers are far larger than the central banking system’s capital. And the tide will rapidly ebb on them with rising interest rates.
Inflation and interest rate outlook
Starting with input prices, the commodity tracker in Figure 6 illustrates the rise in commodity and energy prices in euros, ever since the US Fed went “all in” in early 2020. To these inputs we can add soaring shipping costs, logistical disruption, and labour shortages — in effect all the problems seen in other jurisdictions. Additionally, this article demonstrates that not only is the ECB determined not to raise interest rates, but it simply cannot afford to. Being on the edge of a combined government funding crisis and with a possible collapse in the repo market taking out the banking system, the ECB is paralyzed with fear.
That being so, we can expect further weakness in the euro exchange rate. And the commodity tracker in Figure 6 shows that when commodity prices break out above their current consolidation phase, they will likely push alarmingly higher in euros at least. The ECB’s dilemma over choosing inflationary financing or saving the currency is about to get considerably worse. And for probable confirmation of mounting fear over the situation in Frankfurt, look no further than the resignation of the President of the Bundesbank, who has asked the Federal President to dismiss him early for personal reasons. It was all very polite, but a high-flying, sound money man such as Jens Weidmann is unlikely to just want to spend more time with his family. That he can no longer act as a restraint on the ECB’s inflationism is clear, and more than any outsider he will be acutely aware of the coming crisis.
Let us hope that Weidmann will be available to pick up the pieces and reintroduce a gold-backed mark.
Spread & Containment
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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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.”
International
‘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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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:
Ep. 81 They’re still claiming the Covid vax is safe and effective. Yet somehow Dr. Pierre Kory treats hundreds of patients who’ve been badly injured by it. Why is no one in the public health establishment paying attention? pic.twitter.com/IekW4Brhoy
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 13, 2024
"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."
Tucker Carlson Asks the Forbidden Question
— The Vigilant Fox ???? (@VigilantFox) March 14, 2024
He wants to know why the people who made the claim “safe and effective” aren’t being held to criminal liability for abetting the “killing of all these Americans.”
DR. PIERRE KORY: “It’s my kind of belief, looking back, that [safe and… pic.twitter.com/Icnge18Rtz
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."
Dr. Pierre Kory: Big Pharma is ‘TERRIFIED’ of Vitamin D
— The Vigilant Fox ???? (@VigilantFox) March 14, 2024
Why?
Because “It threatens the DISEASE MODEL.”
A new meta-analysis out of Italy, published in the journal, Nutrients, has unearthed some shocking data about Vitamin D.
Looking at data from 16 different studies and 1.26… pic.twitter.com/q5CsMqgVju
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...
Government
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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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 $319,000 − more than 29 times the average for a nursing home in 2021 − and suspended payments to the home from federal Medicaid and Medicare funds.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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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