Wisconsin families searching for a nursing home used to be able to see exactly who owned it. Not anymore. The state's directory of licensed nursing homes, maintained by the Department of Health Services, has quietly dropped all ownership information from its latest version, while still listing contact details and bed counts for each facility.
Until this year, that same directory included facility owner names and ownership types, including for-profit, nonprofit, and government-owned, according to reporting by WPR. The outlet reports that the agency maintains a directory of all licensed nursing homes in the state, including contact information and the number of beds available, but that ownership details have simply vanished. Jessica Radtke, director of DHS's Bureau of Nursing Home Care, told a Small Town and Rural Seniors organizer in an email that the agency had recently transitioned to a new data system that does not include ownership information, which is what led to its removal from the directory.
Radtke also noted in that email that ownership information is publicly available through the online Cost Compare tool from Medicare, suggesting the data has not disappeared entirely, just moved elsewhere. DHS did not provide comment on the change to public data despite repeated requests from WPR, leaving the agency's broader rationale largely unaddressed.
A Reedsburg Advocate's Fight for Transparency
Judy Brey, a retired teacher and Small Town and Rural Seniors organizer in Reedsburg, says the missing data isn't a minor inconvenience. She argues that anyone searching for a nursing home should know who owns it and what kind of company stands behind it. Brey said residents do not trust federal sources to retain ownership information for long, a concern that fuels her group's push to get the data restored at the state level.
Small Town and Rural Seniors sent a letter to DHS in August demanding the agency restore the information, per WPR's account. The group worries that a lack of ownership transparency benefits private corporations seeking to acquire county nursing homes while impairing residents' ability to make informed care choices.
Brey said the old directory mattered in a very concrete way for Sauk County residents: it let them identify Aria as the name already attached to their local nursing home, and the directory also allowed concerned residents to identify the other Wisconsin nursing homes owned by Aria and look up their quality of care ratings, the same report notes. Without that tool, Brey said, residents lose an easy way to compare an owner's track record across multiple facilities.
The Sauk County Sale That Sparked the Scrutiny
Brey's concerns trace back to Sauk County, where the County Board voted in 2024 to sell its nursing home. According to a Sauk County press release, the board approved the sale of the Sauk County Health Care Center on Sept. 10, 2024, by a vote of 18 for and 13 against. Brey said Sauk County officials did not disclose the buyer before the sale vote, but she and others figured out beforehand that Aria was already listed in DHS records.
Brey, who opposed the sale, was part of a citizen group that sued Sauk County over the transaction in 2024, but the legal challenge was largely unsuccessful. Court records cited by madison.com show Columbia County Judge Todd Hepler dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice on July 9.
Why County-Owned Homes Are Under Pressure Statewide
Sauk County is far from alone. Wisconsin has more county-owned nursing homes than nearly any other state, and Wisconsin Watch reports the state has 36 county-owned nursing homes, more than any state other than Indiana. That same outlet notes the Wisconsin Counties Association projects a need for roughly 10,000 new skilled nursing beds statewide by 2035, underscoring the financial pressure counties face as they weigh whether to keep running these facilities.
Those pressures have already reshaped the landscape elsewhere. In Lincoln County, the County Board voted to sell the county-owned Pine Crest Nursing Home, which had served the county for over 70 years, to The Ensign Group, according to the Wisconsin Examiner. Community members there told the outlet that staffing declined within months of the switch from county to corporate ownership, with one resident saying plainly, “The staffing is less than it was when the county ran it.”
Research cited by Wisconsin Watch suggests that pattern isn't unique to Lincoln County. Several grassroots campaigns across the state are working to halt privatization of county-owned homes, which the outlet reports tend to be better staffed, offer higher quality of care and draw fewer complaints than their private counterparts. In Portage County, the contrast shows up in the numbers: the publicly owned Portage County Health Care Center carries a five-star rating, while the privately owned Stevens Point Health Services has just one star, Wisconsin Watch found. Portage County voters chose to keep their facility public, approving a 2018 tax referendum with about 60% support and a 2022 referendum with 59% support, according to the same report.
Federal data backs up the broader pattern. NPR reports that Medicare data shows Wisconsin's county-owned facilities, on average, draw fewer complaints than facilities in the state owned by for-profits, even as counties across the country increasingly try to get out of the nursing home business to cut costs. Wisconsin Watch separately reported that in 2024 at least five counties considered selling, started the sales process or sold their county-owned nursing homes. The report also cited financial pressures and staffing shortages, and said that 22 Wisconsin counties have sold or closed such facilities over the past three decades.
For Brey, the fix is straightforward even if the politics around it are not: she wants ownership data back in Wisconsin's own database, where residents can find it without having to dig through a federal tool they may not trust to last. Until DHS says otherwise, that information will remain a click away on Medicare's Cost Compare site rather than inside the state's own nursing home directory.
