The economy and demographics are killing another South Dakota nursing home, this time in Corsica:
Corsica’s Good Samaritan Society nursing home will be closing.
“In Corsica, we are facing workforce shortages that are expected to intensify in the coming years. As a result, we have made the difficult decision to close Good Samaritan Society,” vice president of operations Katie Davis said in a written statement to KELOLAND News.
According to Davis, the closure is being coordinated with the re-opening of the Good Samaritan facility in Wagner, which is around 30 miles away. The Wagner facility was temporarily closed aftera fire in 2022 that caused smoke and water damage. The facility will reopen in October, according to Good Samaritan Society.
“While closure is always a last resort, despite our best efforts, we cannot continue our mission without a sustainable local workforce,” Davis wrote [Marissa Brunkhorst, “Corsica Good Samaritan Nursing Home to Close,” KELO-TV, 2025.09.18].
Gee, maybe Kristi Noem should’ve spent another million to shoot a workforce recruitment ad showing her dropping Grandma during a bed transfer.
Or maybe Good Sam should divert some of parent org Sanford Health‘s millions of dollars from the sports complex budget to raise wages and attract workforce to Corsica.
Or at the very least, Good Sam/Sanford could step aside and kindly allow someone else to run a nursing home in Corsica, which Good Sam/Sanford, according to Corsica native and now Representative Erik Muckey (D-15/Sioux Falls), is not:
“This is a decision that has interesting context, and potentially anti-competitive actions that are frankly driving this decision to close the facility,” Muckey said “To do this really, from my end, is a slap in the face.”
What Muckey views as anti-competitive action is a non-compete clause for the building once the home closes.
That means any future buyer of the facility can’t reopen as a new care home, making it nearly impossible for Corsica to open another long-term-care facility without an entirely new facility.
“I want to be fair in my assessment that I don’t have every bit of information about what agreements Sanford and Good Sam have placed in the community,” Muckey said. “The information I have available to me tells me that they have placed pretty significant barriers for the facility to be purchased, let alone to staff the facility. I don’t think that’s fair to the community, and frankly I don’t have a lot of patience for any entity to tell a rural community they can or can’t have access to something” [CJ Keene, “Lawmakers See ‘Anti-Competitive’ Elements in Sanford Closure of Corsica Nursing Home,” SDPB, 2025.09.30].
I’ve heard of non-compete clauses for workers, which President Joe Biden worked to ban to promote practical liberty and true capitalism but which ban dictator Trump is now erasing, but this is the first time I’ve read about a non-compete clause for a building. South Dakota limits non-compete agreements to two years but prohibits non-competes of any length for many health care professionals. The 2023 Legislature expanded that ban to several health care jobs but did not include all nursing home staff.
Rep. Muckey plans to seek legislative reforms to address the bind in which Sanford is leaving Corsica. He has support from Corsica’s Representative Marty Overweg (R-21/New Holland), who thinks Sanford is not playing nicely:
Overweg’s said the situation in isn’t a typical rural closure.
“No, no. This is Sanford,” Overweg said. “This is Sanford wanting to play by their own rules.”
The pair say they want to tackle anti-competitive business practices in the industry during the upcoming legislative session.
Both offer one concession – it’s challenging to stay solvent in the long-term care industry in rural settings. However, Overweg said that’s not the whole picture with Sanford.
“(Sanford) wants to be classified as a non-profit, but as soon as they run into where they can’t make a profit – they run and hide,” Overweg said. “Then, when they leave a community like Corsica alone, they’re going to be without a facility, they’ll only sell that building with a non-compete (clause), which I think is totally wrong.”
Overweg said that’s not the rules to the game.
“I think if they want to operate under a nonprofit, there’s some things they’re going to have to abide by,” Overweg said. “They can’t have both rules going their way” [Keene, 2025.09.30].
Maybe Muckey and Overweg can address Corsica’s conundrum from a property rights angle that motivates many of the new members of Overweg’s caucus: if a local entity acquires the nursing home that Good Sam/Sanford is abandoning, that new owner should be able to what it wants with its new property, including set up an enterprise that is vital to the health and economic well-being of the community, regardless of the budget-boosting wishes of the previous owner.
I am not familiar with the ownership history of Corsica’s nursing home. But if it’s like a lot of places, it was started by local investors who wanted to provide a place for their local residents to spend their last days. Then the local investors grew old and/or discouraged about the challenges of running a nursing home in a state that expects private pay residents to pay a big chunk of Medicaid residents’ bills, and they sold to whoever would get them off the hook. For Sanford or some other operator to buy up these homes with the ulterior motive of limiting competition is….capitalism in an industry handicapped by a partial dependence on government money. Selby prevailed when Good Sam decided to close them down, and the community is still operating it. That was the year before Sanford took over Good Sam. Hmmm….
Susan. I don’t know the full history of the Mobridge shut down but am glad that we have Selby, Eureka, and Bowdle care centers. The shut down in Mobridge changed the demographics in a huge way. Retirees and lifelong residents moved, along with the staff, while fishermen from around the state bought up fishing shacks, some houses are now RB&Bs, a lot of out of staters paying $300,000 for homes on the north side of town. The population in Walworth Country has dropped. yet the median income has risen.
I read somewhere that during the Ice Barbies reign in SD, 12 nursing homes closed down while next door in Minnesnowta they couldn’t build them fast enough. It’s the number one destination for my fellow retired teachers who rave about the benefits for the elderly, especially in small towns.
From experience, I believe SD is anti-elderly and anti-family state.
After Sanford took over Good Sam, Kelby Krabbenhoft began stripping the local nursing homes of the long standing local endowments, transferred the buildings and land to their holding company plus started imposing a stiff “management” fee in addition to rental contracts on each of the facilities. It has broken the backs of the individual nursing homes by stripping them of the equity and cushions those local investors worked so hard to secure.
Lennox had a decent nursing home operating under the Good Sam label. After the assumption and stripping the nursing home of its value, Sanford had Good Sam shut it down and then knocked it down. Sanford has continued to bleed the money and assets out of each of the facilities it takes over. Sanford “Health”, and including Denny Sanford himself, have never done anything for the good of South Dakota or the state’s people. We have less actual healthcare now than we had 40 years ago. We now have a profit system to suck everything out of us, leaving us unable to let us live and die with dignity.
The greed of our local healthcare giants, since the Pentecostal wingnuts brought in Kelby, have forever destroyed our ability to help those who can least defend themselves. These Pentecostals nuts have to make money off everything and everyone but themselves.
Our nursing home problem in this state and nationwide could be solved by changing the tax laws to restrict the abusive investor fees charged the supposed non-profits that are then used to buy (Lewis Drug anyone?) or guild industrial sports complexes with nonprofit proceeds (Sanford Sports Complex) or plastering the nonprofit’s name on expensive signage.
Look again at the Lennox history, there was no need to allow Sanford to steal the money from the community, shutdown a good facility and then tear it down so no one else could keep it open. Anywhere else in civilized society, this would be investigated as a crime.
@VM – Good One …
South Dakota is one of 22 states currently in recession.
Thune, Rounds, Johnson, are you paying attention?