Our nursing home disgrace continues

The nursing home industry in Louisiana is among the worst in America. So powerful is its lobby that no one tries to keep it a secret. It's an accepted fact—and governors and legislators are perfectly content doing nothing about it.

OK. We get it. The answer to all your questions is money.

So what can actually be done?

Why it matters: You may not be facing the realities of this problem today, but many in Baton Rouge are entering the "return the favor" phase and having to care for their aging parents.

By the numbers: Louisiana is aging faster than most people realize.

• The share of residents 65 and older has nearly doubled since 1980—from 9.6% to 17.7%, just below the national average of 18%.
• The ratio of children to seniors has collapsed from 3.3-to-1 in 1980 to 1.3-to-1 today—a steeper drop than the national trend.
• Ten parishes now have more seniors than children.

Best practices: The solutions aren't experimental. They're working right now in states that decided their elderly residents mattered more than nursing home PAC money.

• Ohio bypassed the legislature entirely—a governor's executive order created a nursing home task force, produced a public dashboard for families to compare facilities and rewrote state law to require full financial disclosure from all ownership interests.
• New Jersey mandated that facilities spend at least 90% of revenue on direct patient care and set a wage floor for care workers at $3 above the state minimum wage.
• Illinois rewired its Medicaid payments to reward facilities that actually hired and kept nurses. Hospitalizations among nursing home patients dropped 4%. Maine, New Jersey and Ohio have since followed.
• Minnesota has run a public nursing home report card since 2006—independent surveys, tied to performance-based payments.

Money talks: With the nursing home lobby perhaps the most powerful in Louisiana, enacting meaningful change isn't an uphill battle; it's scaling Mount Everest.

• Nearly half of Louisiana's nursing homes carry a one- or two-star rating under the federal five-star system. A 2025 national study ranked the state last in the country for senior care quality.
• Last year, Shreveport state Sen. Alan Seabaugh sponsored a bill to cap nursing home lawsuit damages while simultaneously defending a nursing home operator in one of the exact cases the bill would restrict.
• Baton Rouge nursing home owner Bob Dean evacuated more than 800 residents from seven facilities to a squalid warehouse during Hurricane Ida in 2021—seven died. Dean pleaded no contest to 15 criminal charges, including cruelty to the infirm, and walked out with three years of probation. The state's own attorney general said he should have gone to prison.

The bottom line: The tools exist and the models work to address an atrocious system. Louisiana's aging population can't wait forever on governors and legislators who've made their priorities clear.