Wisconsin Scrubs Nursing Home Owners From Public Directory
Older adult advocates say the change shields private buyers and weakens family choice on care homes.
Judy Brey, of Sauk County, left, leads a meeting with fellow county-owned nursing home advocates to prepare for a meeting with state officials, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025, at the Hilton Madison Monona Terrace in Madison, Wis. Joe Timmerman/Wisconsin Watch
An advocacy group for older adults is demanding state health officials continue reporting who owns nursing homes, citing concerns about the takeover of county-operated facilities by private companies with a track record of lower quality care.
The Wisconsin Department of Health Services maintains a directory of all licensed nursing homes in the state, including contact information and the number of beds available.
Up until this year, the directory also included the name of the facility’s owner and the type of ownership, including for-profit corporation, nonprofit or government-owned.
But the latest version of the directory no longer has ownership information listed.
Advocacy group Small Town and Rural Seniors, or STARS, sent a letter to DHS in August demanding the agency restore the information on the directory.
The group is worried that the lack of transparency benefits private corporations looking to take over county nursing homes, and hurts residents’ ability to make informed decisions about where they or their family member should receive care.
“Anybody who is looking at a nursing home for their loved one, that would be good information to have: Who owns this? What kind of company are they?” said Judy Brey, a retired teacher and STARS organizer in Reedsburg.
Brey has been one of the residents fighting against the sale of Sauk County’s nursing home. The citizen group sued the county in 2024, but has been largely unsuccessful in their legal challenge of the sale.
Before the county board voted to sell the nursing home in 2024, Brey said officials would not divulge the name of the private buyer.
“We figured it out because we went into the DHS records and found out that this Aria company, you know, already had their name on our nursing home,” Brey said.
She said the directory also allowed concerned residents to identify the other Wisconsin nursing homes owned by Aria and look up their quality of care ratings.
Wisconsin has more county-owned nursing homes than most other states, and the facilities tend to offer better care. But in recent years, a number of counties have considered privatizing or sold the facilities due to financial pressures or staffing shortages.
DHS did not provide comment on the change to public data despite repeated requests from WPR.
In an email obtained by WPR, Jessica Radtke, director of the Bureau of Nursing Home Care at DHS, told a STARS organizer that the agency had recently transitioned to a new data system that does not include ownership information, which is what led to its removal from the directory.
Radtke pointed out in the email that ownership information is publicly available through the online Cost Compare tool from Medicare.
But Brey said the response passes the buck.
“This is Wisconsin data that should be in (the state) database for people to look at,” she said. “Frankly, with what’s going on at the federal level, we don’t trust that they’re going to have that information for very long.”
Wisconsin no longer reports who owns the state’s nursing homes was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.
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