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Strum nursing home closing soon

Leader-Telegram - 10/17/2017

Oct. 17--Medicaid payments that fall short of the full cost of caring for nursing home residents and increased competition for services that helped cover those losses are leading Jack Halbleib to close his last facility for rural western Wisconsin seniors.

The owner and administrator of the Strum Area Health & Rehabilitation nursing home and Crystal Lake Terrace assisted living announced Monday that those facilities will be closing in coming months.

"This will be the third nursing home I have closed," Halbleib said, "all for the same exact reasons."

Earlier this year he closed Fall Creek Valley Care Center, and the Gilman Care Center was shuttered in 2014.

An exact date for closing the 46-bed Strum nursing home and the attached assisted living housing is not yet set. The state requires homes to stay open for up to three months as residents are relocated, which would be until Jan. 2 for the Strum center.

"People are just starting to make arrangements, look around, see which other facilities have openings," Halbleib said. His staff are assisting with their residents' relocation plans.

The nursing home currently has 28 residents. Last year it often had between 32 and 35 residents, Halbleib said.

Declining nursing home numbers have been seen throughout the state as more community-based settings for seniors, such as in-home care, memory care and assisted living facilities, have grown.

But in a community as small as Strum, those services aren't available, Halbleib said, which will result in people moving out of the area to communities such as Whitehall, Mondovi, Pigeon Falls and Eau Claire.

Village leaders recently heard the nursing home will be closing.

"Anyone needing assisted living or nursing home care will have to go farther from home, and loved ones will have farther to travel for visits," village President Dean Boehne wrote in an email to the Leader-Telegram.

Furthermore, losing an employer in the village of just 1,114 people will have an impact on workers who live in Strum.

"It hurts as there are not a lot of jobs available in the village so employees will have to travel farther," Boehne wrote.

Declining resident numbers have reduced staffing at the Strum facilities, which Halbleib said is about 50, down from 60 a year ago.

Costs, competition

Financial pressure and competition from others in the industry led to the closing of the Strum nursing home and its associated assisted living housing.

Halbleib's company, JMH Enterprises, bought the nursing home in 2006 and extensively renovated it in 2010.

The nursing home was profitable until the past couple of years, Halbleib said.

"Then we really started to see a market shift as all the assisted livings and memory cares and the real effort to keep people out of nursing homes and put them into facilities that are more community-oriented," he said.

Another loss came in the last year and a half when the nursing home's short-term rehabilitation business dried up as area hospitals and clinics added recovery suites.

"All of those do what the nursing homes used to do," Halbleib said.

The facility used to have six to 10 rehab patients, he said, but that's down to one or two a month.

That business did help make up for cost shortfalls from residents who relied on Medicaid, which amounted to about 80 percent of the Strum nursing home's residents.

In addition to underfunding from Medicaid, Halbleib said private insurers have become more aggressive in setting parameters for eligibility for nursing home care and tedious requirements for approving payments.

Halbleib added an assisted living wing to the nursing home in 2011, which has consistently been home to five residents.

"That is full and would be doing well, but that alone could not sustain the operation down here," Halbleib said.

He considered increasing the assisted living portion of the business, but a market study found there isn't enough demand in the area to support a significant expansion of that.

Contact: 715-833-9204, andrew.dowd@ecpc.com, @ADowd_LT on Twitter

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