Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Nursing Home Companies Sue to Undo Who Can Build

Leon County Judge John Cooper on June 30, 2022, in a screen grab from The Florida Channel.
Flickr Creative Commons
/
The Florida Channel
Leon County Judge John Cooper on June 30, 2022, in a screen grab from The Florida Channel.

  More than two dozen nursing home companies are suing the state for being passed up on building new homes in Florida. It could take the rest of the year to sort out winners and losers.

The court process could take six to nine months to play out, which would delay when patients could access the new beds. Check here for a list of the companies suing and the initial documents.

Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Elizabeth Dudek said 13 nursing home projects aren’t being challenged, which clears the way for their construction.

“Just under 800 new beds, community beds, that will be brought online,” Dudek said. “And what’s kind of exciting with that, there will be around 800 new jobs related to that that didn’t exist.”

The state approved new nursing homes last month for the first time in more than a decade. The state is expected to need 15,000 new nursing home beds in the next 15 years.

-- Reporter Abe Aboraya is part of WMFE in Orlando. Health News Florida receives support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Health News Florida reporter Abe Aboraya works for WMFE in Orlando. He started writing for newspapers in high school. After graduating from the University of Central Florida in 2007, he spent a year traveling and working as a freelance reporter for the Seattle Times and the Seattle Weekly, and working for local news websites in the San Francisco Bay area. Most recently Abe worked as a reporter for the Orlando Business Journal. He comes from a family of health care workers.