Guard your elders - Carlyle Group to pay $6.3 billion for nursing homes

[babylonsister]

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071010/BUSINESS06/710100311/0/NEWS07

Carlyle to pay $6.3 billion for nursing homes

October 10, 2007

BY PATRICIA ANSTETT

FREE PRESS MEDICAL WRITER

In one of the largest purchases in the industry, the Carlyle Group, a private investment group, plans to spend $6.3 billion next week to buy a nursing home chain that has 31 Michigan facilities.

Manor Care Inc. of Toledo has scheduled a stockholders vote at 2 p.m. Oct. 17 on the sale of its network of 500 nursing home, assisted living and rehabilitation facilities. In metro Detroit, many of the facilities operate under the names Heartland. They provide nursing home, assisted living and rehabilitation services to more than 3,000 Michigan residents, most at facilities with the company's Heartland Health Care Center name. Manor Care has 60,000 employees nationwide.

The Service Employees International Union, representing nursing home staffers, including 250 employees at four Manor Care facilities in Michigan, asked the Michigan Department of Community Health to carefully review all aspects of the sale, according to Alex Shulman, union spokesman.

Today, representatives of the union, Citizens for Better Care in Michigan, a nursing home monitoring agency, two disability coalitions and several legislators scheduled a media briefing at Lansing's state Capitol to denounce the sale.

Shulman said Tuesday that care at Manor Care's facilities will erode if they are sold to a company with little background in health care. The union's complaints are at www.carlylefixmanorcarenow.org.

[Horse with no Name]

1. It was only a matter of time

Am I to guess correctly that somewhere buried in legislation Bush dismantled laws pertaining to nursing homes?

[mod mom]

2. let me guess, they sign away their assets for their care and.....

:scared:

[monmouth]

3. I'm going to start being a lot nicer to my kids....Must send some small gift

to each one today for being "always there for me when I need them." Actually, they always are, but this is a little scary.

[woodsprite]

4. We'll have to watch the ties between this and the Texas funeral home

company. What a better way to reduce the need for medicaid/care, or bilk them even more.

[MikeNearMcChord]

5. The next they will start a food processing firm, The Soylent Corp.

And by 2008 Soylent Green will be on the market.

[DKRC]

6. Ahh, but this isn't all bad news

for those of us with hatefilled Repub elders this is poetic justice. Turning them over to the tender mercies of their own seems fitting.
:evilgrin: