For-profit rehabilitation hospitals are booming in the United States, but their rapid growth is leaving patient safety far behind.The US post-acute care industry, which deals with rehab and long-term care facilities, was worth an estimated $483 billion in 2024, and is expected to grow to over $785 billion by 2034.On paper, it's easy to assume all that business potential would translate to quality care. Unfortunately, for thousands of patients across the country, that couldn’t be further from the truth, as Encompass Health Corporation — the McDonald's of post-acute care, basically — makes clear.Bombshell reporting by the New York Times this week uncovered a horrifying track record by Encompass and other for-profit rehab outfits. Though negligence in rehab facilities might not seem as overtly dangerous as it is in generic hospital settings, it often leads to injuries, unplanned readmissions to general hospitals, and even death.At the Encompass facility in Jackson, Tennessee, for example, a 68-year-old patient was found lying in a pool of his own blood. Per the NYT, a pressure- and motion-triggered alarm meant to alert nurses if he left his bed had been turned off prior to the gruesome discovery.A patient in Morgantown, West Virginia, died a similarly preventable death, after a fall off the bed gave her a "huge gash" on her forehead. There, too, the hospital chain's alarms failed to notify staff in time."We are having a lot of problems with the bed alarms," a nurse technician told police inspectors after the woman's death, according to an inspection report obtained by the NYT.Another incident in South Dakota led to the death of a 73-year-old man when a nurse administered the wrong drug. That was just one of 26 adverse drug events the Encompass site was responsible for over the span of just six months.Per the NYT, Encompass owns 168 hospitals, and was responsible for nearly 250,000 patients in 2024. In 2023, Encompass helped flip the rehabilitation sector from a mostly non-profit space to a predominantly profit-seeking one.Though non-profit rehab is its own kind of nightmare, particularly for low-income or "charity care" patients, this pivot to for-profit models has come with a notable increase in unplanned readmissions to general hospitals.Unlike nursing homes and skilled nursing facilities (SNFs), these types of errors in post-acute care aren't explicitly disclosed to Medicare recipients, elderly and disabled patients who are at heightened risk for medical neglect. Nor are ownership details, such as the involvement of private equity firms or real estate investment trusts — profit-seeking groups whose participation in the medical field leads to worse outcomes in patient care.That's not to say Medicare doesn't keep tabs on rehab facilities, however. As the NYT notes, out of the 41 inpatient rehab sites Medicare judged to have "statistically significantly worse rates of potentially preventable readmissions," 34 were owned and operated by Encompass.Though Encompass has toyed around with private equity spinoffs in the past, its main overlords are institutional investors — professional investment fund managers — such as Vanguard Group, whose fund Vanguard Health was ordered to pay $18 million in claims related to "grossly substandard nursing home services," and Blackrock, whose healthcare dealings have been mired in controversy.Speaking to the NYT, executive vice president and general counsel for Encompass, Patrick Darby, called Medicare's readmission ratings a "crude scoring measure." He added that health inspection violations are "rare occurrences" that "do not support an inference of widespread quality concerns."Whether this is empirically true or not remains to be seen, as the rapidly changing corporate rehab landscape demands further study. Still, it's hard to imagine the families of patients who died under Encompass's care share the executive's attitude.More on healthcare: Insurance Company Accused of Pressuring Medical Staff to Change Patients' Status to "Do Not Resuscitate"The post For-Profit Hospital Chain Reportedly Left Patient Lying in Pool of His Own Blood appeared first on Futurism.