We are in North Carolina. We were built and owned by the county's non-profit hospital system, opening in 2003. In addition to the CCRC (45 cottages; 110 IL apartments; 12 AL rooms; 12 Memory rooms; 24 SNF beds for the CCRC's continuum of care), the CCRC's Health Care unit was attached to a 81-bed SNF open to the public with both Medicare and Medicaid beds. All this was built on the scraped hospital grounds --- a new hospital (our owner) was built across town. In 2013 that local hospital district merged with a larger non-profit hospital/clinic system in the next county. In 2017 management was outsourced, with our becoming run by a larger non-profit CCRC located in that adjacent county. Its own CCRC was traditional Life Care and about twice our size. In 2019 our hospital owner decided to divest itself of the public SNF on our campus by selling off the licenses (North Carolina is a Certificate of Need state, so the asset was the 81 licenses, not the bricks and mortar and furnishings. They managed to sell 54 of the 81 licenses. The remaining 27 beds are dual certified -- Medicare and Medicaid. So we currently have a large empty building on campus.) With that decision to sell and empty the public SNF, our staff had to find new places for its 65 patients DURING COVID, if you can imagine the challenge of that. In 2022 our CCRC was sold by the hospital district to the CCRC group that had managed us for 5 years. THEN our new owner discovered things (again, they had managed us for 5 years so I don't really understand why action wasn't taken sooner and the corrective action more "spread out"). They discovered the "variety" of contracts within what was routinely offered. What is routinely offered? Someone moving in could choose either fee-for-service or equalized pricing Life Care. There were two Life Care refund contract options (50% and 90%) in addition to the option of a non-refund LC contracts that amortized to zero refund after 4 years. Fee-for-Service never had refund contracts, just the 4-year amortization. Our new owner "discovered" upon owning in 2022 that the refund contracts had been underpriced and stopped offering them. Why they didn't pick up on that sort of thing sooner, while managing us, I'll never know. Then they "discovered" inequities of what residents were paying for occupying the exact same units. Oldtimers had to "catch up" with what newcomers were paying. Hence the substantial adjustments being communicated now for 2025 --- that they justify as being "the fair thing to do."
Some residents now fear they will run out of money. I had asked our "new" management back in 2017 where the Resident Assistance Fund balance (benevolence for when people can't fully pay anymore) was located in the financials of the annual Disclosure Statement that North Carolina requires -- it took 5 requests with two Executive Directors to FINALLY get the answer in 2019. When I saw it, I said "that's not enough" and I'm no financial genius. And on the books it was combined with the Holiday Fund for employees. In response, the very young Exec Dir said, "Yeah, I know. We'll be working on some philanthropy strategies soon." Never happened, and in 2025 this fund will run dry and the 2015 budget shows the shortfall as a line item in the 2015 operating budget, affecting everyone's monthly fees. The "normal increase" just announced for 2025, for those who moved in recently, is 5.5%. Old-timers are getting that 5.5% folded into, say, the 22% increase for 2025 (each "adjustment" was individual and communicated individually). Also communicated at the same time was the resident's next big adjustment step for 2026 -- it's 13.3% for those who got the 22% this year for 2015. On top of that will be whatever the "normal" increase is --- say it's 5% for 2026, so the total increase would be then be 18.3% for 2026.
Apologies for all the detail above. I couldn't stop myself.