A senior-care facility outside Detroit filed for bankruptcy protection, blaming its default on $52 million in municipal-bond debt on coronavirus pandemic restrictions that curbed occupancy, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Henry Ford Village, which has more than 1,000 units and offers three levels of care, sought chapter 11 protection Wednesday hoping to find a financial sponsor or a strategic partner to put the facility on sound footing, according to court papers filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Detroit. Occupancy has fallen as the coronavirus spread, stressing Henry Ford Village to the breaking point. Some seniors who were living there have left to move in with family, fearful of the contagion that devastated some nursing homes in the early days of the pandemic, Chad Shandler, the facility’s chief restructuring officer, said in a declaration filed in court. The Dearborn, Mich., facility has been on strict lockdown since the start of the pandemic, preventing vacant units from being shown to prospective residents. In addition to debts to bondholders, Henry Ford Village has more than $110 million in liabilities to current and former residents, court papers said. As occupancy declines, Henry Ford Village has to set aside more money for refunding the entrance fees that seniors pay when they move in. Such refunds are the facility’s largest financial obligation, according to court papers. Nursing homes and other senior-care facilities nationwide have been subject to some of the most stringent social-distancing mandates to account for the particular danger posed to seniors living in close quarters. Only recently have some states eased rules against visitors. Read more.
In related news, just weeks after the first known coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil at the outset of a looming pandemic, the woman responsible for helping to protect 1.3 million residents in America’s nursing homes laid out an urgent strategy to slow the spread of infection, the Washington Post reported. In the suburbs of Seattle, federal inspectors had found the Life Care Center of Kirkland failed to properly care for ailing patients or alert authorities to a growing number of respiratory infections. At least 146 other nursing homes across the country had confirmed coronavirus cases in late March when Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, vowed to help “keep what happened in Kirkland from happening again.” The federal agency and its state partners, Verma said, would conduct a series of newly strengthened inspections to ensure 15,400 Medicare-certified nursing homes were heeding long-standing regulations meant to prevent the spread of communicable diseases. It was another key component of a national effort, launched in early March, to shore up safety protocols for the country’s most fragile residents during an unprecedented health emergency. But the government inspectors deployed by CMS during the first six months of the crisis cleared nearly 8 in 10 nursing homes of any infection-control violations even as the deadliest pandemic to strike the United States in a century sickened and killed thousands, a Washington Post investigation found. Those cleared included homes with mounting coronavirus outbreaks before or during the inspections, as well as those that saw cases and deaths spiral upward after inspectors reported no violations had been found, in some cases multiple times. All told, homes that received a clean bill of health earlier this year had about 290,000 coronavirus cases and 43,000 deaths among residents and staff, state and federal data shows. Read more.
