As governors in New York and Florida face political crises over their handling of the pandemic, the scandals have spotlighted how a disproportionate amount of COVID-19 casualties have occurred in the nation’s nursing homes. The situation is a cautionary tale not only about political corruption, but about the consequences of a nursing home infrastructure being run by for-profit corporations — and now a study documents some of the body count.

The analysis found that between 2004 and 2016, more than twenty thousand Americans perished as a consequence of living in nursing homes run by private equity firms. The data showed that going to a private equity–owned nursing home significantly “increases the probability of death during the stay and the following 90 days” as compared to nursing homes with a different ownership structure.

The study from University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, and New York University researchers evaluated data from fifteen thousand nursing homes across the United States, alongside Medicare patient data, to assess the impacts of private equity ownership on patient outcomes. In all, the researchers found that the deaths accounted for “about 160,000 lost life-years.”