Piercing the corporate veil: nursing home ownership in turbulent times

With Covid-19 hitting for-profit nursing homes particularly hard, this chapter focuses on the shift to the private equity (PE) and real estate investment trust (REIT) ownership and operation of them in Canada, and to a lesser extent in Sweden and especially Norway. The increased involvement of PE and REIT makes it more difficult to hold these homes, and the corporations controlling them, to account, as experiences in the US and the UK demonstrate. This chapter closes with discussion of ways in which to reduce and eliminate PE and REIT involvement and more generally for-profit involvement in nursing homes, working to ensure, for example, that their land and buildings are in public hands and that there is full and enforceable transparency of the financial flows among their constituent elements.