CW: Neglect
Twelve nursing homes in Massachusetts are facing the loss of their licenses. One of them is in my hometown. On Tuesday, state regulators moved to revoke the licenses of all 12 facilities operated by RegalCare, following reporting by the Boston Globe Spotlight Team about deteriorating conditions at the chain’s Massachusetts nursing homes.
The state’s action does not mean the facilities are closing immediately, and RegalCare can challenge the revocations. The Globe’s investigation examined what happened as RegalCare expanded across Massachusetts under CEO Eli Mirlis. Quality declined at some facilities after the company took over, while it redirected money to related businesses. State regulators continued approving RegalCare acquisitions even as problems mounted.
In Taunton, the numbers were staggering. RegalCare was spending $530,000 less on nursing services by 2025 than the previous owners had, while registered nursing hours had fallen by more than half. Mirlis’s real estate company was charging the facility $522,000 in rent, over four times what the previous owners had paid.
But numbers like those can blur together until you think about what they mean for the people living inside these facilities. Inspectors found residents left in soiled briefs. Some residents were waiting hours for someone to answer their calls for help. At the Quincy facility, a blind resident who used a wheelchair went down an unblocked ramp and suffered a brain hemorrhage and multiple fractures.
In Greenfield, until recently, RegalCare’s nursing home had a four-star federal quality rating. Earlier this month, it fell to two stars. The state’s notice now lists RegalCare at Greenfield among the 12 facilities whose licenses regulators intend to revoke. Seeing my hometown in this story brought it closer.
But as someone with cerebral palsy, there was another reason I couldn’t shake it.
I know what it means to need help from other people. I know what it means to rely on systems that are supposed to support people. So when I read about staffing cuts while residents wait hours for basic care, it does not feel like an abstract policy failure. It feels like a warning about what can happen when the people who depend most on a system have the least power over it.
We also talk about nursing homes as if every resident is an older adult. Disabled people of all ages can end up in nursing homes, including people who could live in their own homes and communities if the services and supports they need were actually available.
I kept thinking about Olmstead as I read about RegalCare. The Supreme Court’s 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C. established that disabled people have the right to receive support in the most integrated setting. For over 25 years, that decision has been central to the fight for disabled people to receive services in the community rather than being unnecessarily segregated in institutions. That history feels especially fragile now.
In the summer, the Department of Justice announced it would no longer rely on its longstanding Olmstead guidance when enforcing Title II of the ADA and said it planned to revisit that guidance. Olmstead itself has not been overturned. The ADA’s protections have not disappeared. But the federal government has stepped back from a longstanding approach to interpreting and enforcing the right to community living. That matters because the alternative to a bad institution cannot simply be a better institution.
RegalCare is just one chain of nursing homes. The problem runs deeper. It is about what happens when care becomes a place to cut costs, when oversight fails, and when people are left with few alternatives.
Accountability for what happened inside these nursing homes matters. The residents should also have somewhere else to go.
Disabled and older people deserve more than the promise that a facility will treat us well. We deserve a real choice about where we live, the services and supports that make that choice possible. The dignity of knowing our lives are worth investing in.
Sources:
Hixenbaugh, Mike, and Colleen Long. “How Trump’s Homelessness Crackdown Became a Sweeping Retreat from Disability Rights.” NBC News, 2 Oct. 2026, www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/trump-homelessness-crackdown-retreat-disability-rights-olmstead-rcna600545.
Lazar, Kay, and Gordon Russell. “Mass. Regulators Move to Seize Licenses from Regalcare Nursing Home Chain ThatWas Focus of Spotlight Report.” The Boston Globe, 15 Oct. 2026, http://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/10/13/metro/regalcare-nursing-homes-license-revoke/?s.
Poli, Domenic. “Mass. Moves to Strip Licenses from a Dozen RegalCare Nursing Homes.” The Recorder, 14 Oct. 2026,https://recorder.com/2026/10/14/massachusetts-nursing-home-oversight-increase/ .