NURSING HOME TO BE SOLD
Monday, January 11th, 2010 -- 12:24 PM
Memorial Medical Center announced Monday they are in negotiations to sell their nursing home facility. If all goes as planned, the Health & Rehabilitation facility will change hands on March 31. The potential buyer is still anonymous, but MMC CEO Scott Polenz said it an individual, not a corporation. This individual owns several nursing homes in small communities throughout the Midwest.
The nursing home employs 65. They will not have to reapply for their positions, their wages will remain the same, but their benefits package will change.
Polenz says the nursing home has been losing around $1-million a year because of a failing government reimbursement formula.
"Probably around 70% of our residents are on Medicaid. We lose about $60 per day on a Medicaid resident," Polenz says. "It's not that we're running a bad nursing home, or we're doing a bad job, it's just not funded correctly.
MMC has operated the nursing home since 1964 and are reimbursed based on 1964 rates. The new owners will be reimbursed based on current costs.
While government-run facilities, like the Clark County Health Care Center, are subsidized by taxpayers, MMC has subsidized their nursing home with revenues from their hospital and clinic.
"I don't know if it has increased costs, but what it has done is made it difficult to keep our old building up to date," he says. "It's an old building we're in. There have been things we have not been able to do as an organization that we have not been able to do because of the losses attributed to the nursing home."
Polenz doesn't expect many changes from either a customer or employee standpoint.
"What changes is the name of the owner. Our local leadership remains the same. The staff will be same. The residents will be cared for by the exact same people," he says.
The new owner will be contracting with Memorial Medical Center for housekeeping, dietary services and maintenance.
The sale price of the nursing home will remain confidential.
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