Aging in America News

| Degrading Rural Fire Departments, Nursing Homes

| Paul Kleyman

| Even as our world-weary nation hopes to unwrap gifts of calm and peaceful tidings, the Grinch is trying to outrace Santa on Elon’s DOGE rocket to snatch away our very health and safety from under our trees. 

Two recent articles document efforts by private equity firms to gouge the tiny budgets of volunteer fire departments, the heartbeat of small-town America, while other investors are buying public rural nursing homes with a record of slashing staff levels and virtually ripping the support stockings off of patent care.

Underlying these news reports, similar to reporting on other sectors of public service, is the question of whether or not private enterprise should be able to privatize—that is, privateer—at the expense of public goods? That debate is at the core of unmanaged market economics peculiar to the United States. Lacking even the basic constraints of most advanced capital economies, today’s American grifter state remains obscure to a citizenry little to exposed to evidence of degraded human services in the national media or political leadership. 

Something is wrong when rural volunteer fire departments must hold bake sales to cover inflating costs of fire engines, flame retardant, and emergency radio. And nursing home quality shouldn’t have to fall when private equity firms buy formerly public facilities from small and midsized county boards. Yet these are exactly the kinds of public impacts that are replacing public goods with private greed.

Read more: What Does Private Equity Mean for Aging Services?

While news reporting tends to isolate one scandal from another rather than connecting the journalistic dots to broader policies, two stories appeared recently that should draw a straight line between community health and safety and unfettered corporate gouging. None of this is new, but it should not become normalized.

First came Mike Baker’s Dec. 14, 2025 investigation in The New York Times, “Private Equity Finds a New Source of Profit: Volunteer Fire Departments.” He wrote, “Rural departments have long relied on cheap software solutions to keep their operations running. But fire chiefs report sharp price increases as investors have entered the market.”

The article opens, “The Norfolk Volunteer Fire Department operates on an annual budget of $132,000, barely enough to sustain its aging rigs, train unpaid crews and keep the lights on at the station in the hills of northern Connecticut.” 

Baker continued, “Not long ago, it faced a different kind of emergency: The software system it relied on to track detailed incident information was no longer going to be usable. A company backed by private equity investors, ESO Solutions, had acquired the platform and planned to shut it down. The alternative software it was offering would raise the community’s costs from $795 per year to more than $5,000.” 

The Norfolk fire crew shopped for a competitive price and found a company—which soon was bought by the same investment enterprise, which promptly jacked up the cost again. 

Public radio’s Marketplace broadcast followed up on Baker’s story with  “Fire department budgets have a private equity problem,” by program host Kai Ryssdal and producer Andie Corban noted that volunteer fires departments need the software in part to meet government reporting requirements. Townspeople are helping them by holding bake sales and such to pay these companies, while the fire chief has had to curtail planned upgrades for the crews. 

For her story, “Wisconsin Communities Fight to Save County-Owned Nursing Homes from Privatization,” on The Daily Yonder news site (Dec. 16, 2025), reporter Madeline de Figueiredo wrote, “Across Wisconsin, County Boards have been voting to sell their skilled nursing facilities as local communities fight the sales, especially in rural counties.” 

She stressed, “A 2022 report by the Center for Medicare Advocacy warned that privatizing county-owned nursing homes often led to lower staffing levels and diminished quality of care, as for-profit operators prioritized revenue over residents’ needs. The report found that promised cost savings rarely materialized, while accountability and public oversight were significantly reduced.” 

Read more: How Modern Privateers Plunder And Ravage Essential Personal Services — While We Pay For Their Greed (Forbes)

De Figueiredo’s story documents resistance in multiple Wisconsin communities from Stevens Point to Portage County. The Daily Yonder, published by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Rural Strategies, is one of the proliferating regional or special-topic newsrooms around the nation. The writer is one of this year’s Journalists in Aging Fellows, in the program my Journalist Network on Generations group co-sponsors with the Gerontological Society of America.

While daily tabulating of gasoline and grocery costs are relevant to some readers, such reporting is often neutralized by dueling quotes from “bipartisan” sources. Journalists rarely go the extra mile the way De Figueiredo has, underlining ever-present examples of capitalism’s downward spiral for working Americans. 

Let the dots connect to the larger stories.

Paul Kleyman is National Coordinator of the Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), which he co-founded in 1993. He edits its e-newsletter, Generations Beat Online (GBONews.org).