Nursing home beds are in short supply in Florida. But the Agency for Health Care Administration on Friday will announce a list of companies to build 3,100 more. It ends a 14-year moratorium.Lillian Lara’s 87-year-old father fell in December. After a hospital stay, he moved to the Commons at Orlando Lutheran Towers for rehabilitation.
Lara says her father knows he can’t go back home, and he likes where he’s at. But there’s a waiting list for the facility’s 135 nursing home beds. So Lara’s father will have to move somewhere else.
“That’s where we at: Waiting and seeing", Lara said. "Plus praying to god to give us a miracle.”
Things may get better as the state looks to add more than 3,100 new nursing home beds in Florida. It’s the first time the state has allowed construction since 2001.
With fourteen years of demand built up, competition is fierce: For every new bed the state approves, they will turn down five.
The company that owns Lutheran Towers hopes to convert vacant senior apartments into nursing home rooms.
Tony Marshall is an administrator with the Florida Health Care Association, an industry organization for nursing homes. He says new nursing home building could boost construction by $350 to $500 million over the next two years.
Marshall says most nursing home patients have Medicaid, which lose money for the nursing homes. But they’re able to make a profit on short-term Medicare patients who just need rehab.
“Hospitals are now providing much more acute services, and the nursing homes of today are following suit", said Marshall. "They’re sort of the stepdown unit from that acute care hospital for rehab and continuing medical care.”
Richard Montgomery is sitting in a wheel chair doing bicep curls. He’s a Disney engineer, and if you’ve stayed at a Disney hotel like the Grand Floridian, you’ve seen some of his work.
For Lutheran Towers, Montgomery is one of those short-term patients: the inner lining of his aortic valve ruptured in December.
“It literally felt as if someone was stuffing a bowling through my heart”, said Montgomery.
Richard is in rehab now, but he’s planning to go back to work. But he’s a sign of things to come: He’s one of a flood of baby boomers who are reaching retirement age and increasing demand for health care.
In fact, Florida’s 3,100 nursing home beds won’t be enough: Experts predict Florida will need 20,000 new beds in the next 20 years.
Right now, some seniors in Florida are stuck waiting for a nursing home bed, or taking family members to a home that isn’t their first choice.
Lilian Lara says her mother is buried in a cemetery in Orlando. Her father bought the plot next to it.
"And he got his space there waiting for him", Lara said. "And he said it can wait, I ain’t going nowhere"
Where he waits in the meantime isn’t so clear.
