By James C. Sherlock

This author is tired of hearing that the left has compassion for poor people.  

The left that runs Richmond just completed another session in which they refused to face our nursing home crisis.  They claim to prioritize the concerns of minorities, but pretend that Medicaid long-term residential care is somehow not a minority concern.

Too many Virginia nursing facilities are horrible because out-of-state chains take Medicare and Medicaid money and put it in their pockets rather than properly caring for their residents.  It is no more complicated than that.  

Our Governor and too many General Assembly members take money from industry lobbyists, put it in their pockets, and look the other way.  That is not complicated either.  It is corruption.

The current administration, generally tight-lipped about what is happening in the Secretariat of Health and Human Resources, has not offered a comment, much less a plan to improve the situation.  The Department of Health press releases instead lean into things like World Doula Day.

Look at the nursing facilities in Virginia Beach, the Commonwealth’s largest city.

The chart is highlighted with stoplight colors.  It should prove a profound embarrassment to the city and the state.

• People of all ages needing post-hospital residential skilled nursing care have very few beds available at safe facilities.  
• Medicaid members have no safe option for long-term residential care.  

Our Lady of Perpetual Hope is primarily an assisted living and memory care facility.  Medicaid does not pay for those services.  The Jones and Cabacoy Center, much welcomed, serves only Virginia veterans.  Westminster Canterbury is a profoundly expensive continuing care facility with skilled nursing beds available to non-members, but only as space allows.

It is no surprise that the Virginia Beach outposts of two of the worst chains in America, Eastern Healthcare Group and Medical Facilities of America (MFA), DBA LifeWorks Rehab, are uniformly horrible.  Yet they dominate the bed counts in this city.

No one should even consider the facilities that are understaffed.  Those with abuse icons should be avoided.  Both are unsafe, especially for those without a caregiver who checks on them multiple times a week.  That leaves Medicaid members with no skilled nursing facility in the entire city to reasonably choose as a place to go after the hospital for a long-term care transition.  Yet many do not get to choose.  A nursing home is their only option.

This situation is too often replicated, or nearly so, across the entire Commonwealth.  

Governor Youngkin began to address it by revitalizing the Department of Health’s Office of Licensure and Certification and increasing its inspector count.  The General Assembly, freshly convened in 2025 in the immediate aftermath of the Colonial Heights scandal, went along.  Those steps were both necessary and insufficient.  

Until Virginia faces its nursing home chain problem, persons needing residential skilled nursing after hospitalization and those requiring long-term residential care will continue to face unacceptable choices.

Nursing home facility licenses are renewed annually upon application to the Virginia Department of Health.

Ask the Governor, your delegate, and your state senator:

• Why do the licenses of Virginia’s worst nursing facilities continue to be renewed without a review of performance?  Is there any performance too bad to support license renewal?  Why should the Department of Health have to go to court before denying a license rather than afterward, only if sued?
• Why are the worst out-of-state chains permitted to operate in Virginia?  Why does the Department of Health not have regulatory authority over chains?  Why does it not have the authority to ban a chain from Virginia based on overall performance over time?

The questions will come as a surprise, and they will not have an answer.  Perhaps we can make the questions less surprising by continuing to ask them.  

Contact the governor, your state senator, and your delegate today and once a month thereafter with those questions.  In fact, send them this article.

At some point, we will get the right answers.