More than 10,000 Americans turn 65 every day. By 2030, 18 percent of the nation’s population will have reached that age, including the entire baby boom generation, according to projections by Pew Research Center.
The aging populace has been a boon for Life Care Centers of America Inc., the third-largest nursing home operator in the U.S., and made Forrest Preston, the closely held company’s founder and chairman, a billionaire.
“They’ve been like the little engine that could,” John O’Connor, editorial director for long-term care magazine McKnight’s, said in a phone interview. “Year after year, they’ve steadily gotten bigger and stronger. They really are titans within the field.”
Revenue at the Cleveland, Tennessee-based company has jumped 81 percent in the past decade to $2.9 billion, according to PrivCo, a New York firm that studies private company performance.
Life Care manages more than 200 facilities with 31,255 beds in 28 states, and provides long-term, post-acute and short-term care and rehabilitation services for elderly patients, and also offers home-care services through its subsidiary, Life Care Home Health Inc.
While many long-term care operators are expanding into hospice care –- a niche O’Connor calls the “flavor of the month” –- Life Care has focused on long-term care, where a private room in a nursing home costs almost $88,000 a year on average, according to a 2013 survey by Genworth Financial Inc.
Top Honor
In an effort to reduce re-hospitalizations, Life Care places more full-time doctors in its facilities than its competitors. Most long-term care providers opt to keep a doctor on call, according to Jay Moore, Director of Communications at the Tennessee Health Care Association, a trade organization of which Life Care is a member. The company breaks that mold.
“They’re known in long-term care circles for championing that concept,” said Moore in a phone interview.
Life Care President Beecher Hunter told Provider Magazine in 2012 that the company reduced re-hospitalizations to 15 percent from 40 percent in one year among its facilities with resident physicians.