Often what another poster said: there's a large admittance fee and/or you sign all of your assets over. Combined with the Medicare/Medicaid issues cited by another sibling post, there's a strong financial disincentive to have residents live longer.

Most people don’t have a lot of assets. Medicare pays a decent reimbursement rate that declines over time. Medicare also pays for rehab tied to outcome, and nursing homes tend to have bad outcomes so they only get 90-180 days of that.

Once you’re off Medicare, if you cannot private pay (or once you run out of cash), you go on Medicaid. The county seizes your remaining assets and pays a very low reimbursement.

The ideal nursing home patient either has cash or requires short term rehab, and either leaves or dies in <180 days. The old ladies watching judge Judy or playing checkers are low margin.

Some also charge a $80k+ admittance fee. They try and make it sound nice by saying the fee is so they will never kick them out if they run out of money.

I would suspect there must be some fine print somewhere that states that you would be kicked out if you ran out of money eventually. The facility I worked at charged $4500 a month which was considered really cheap as another one near by had no problem charging $6500 a month but provided half the care my facility did, just a nicer setting along a lake with a beautiful view. At even $4500 a month it is $54,000 annually. I can also tell you things can move very slowly in the medical field for these elderly people so say if something big in the family did happen and they suddenly could not pay, that $80k would get eaten up very quickly as they tried to locate additional funds for that individual. The facility that I worked at only required a single months deposit. When people could not afford to pay my boss would often cut them deals to have them stay longer.

The quick turnovers are likely caused by being understaffed and underpaying employees. Both of which would help with profits.