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Ashvin Gandhi, PhD, is a faculty associate at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and an assistant professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. He researches regulation in the health care industry. Gandhi also studies how health care providers' finances and ownership may affect the quality of care that they provide to patients. His research shows how the effect of private equity ownership on nursing home residents depends on the competitive incentives faced by the private equity owner. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Gandhi has studied the many factors affecting COVID-19 outbreaks at nursing homes, including facility quality, location, staffing, and resident composition.
In a recent project, Gandhi estimates the prevalence of discrimination in nursing home admissions and evaluates potential enforcement and mitigation solutions. In another project, he simulates the national and international impacts if the United States were to implement a rule constraining pharmaceutical prices based on prices abroad.
Gandhi earned a BA in mathematics and economics from Pomona College and a PhD in economics from Harvard University.
Nursing home operators often have multiple related companies that do business with one another, said Ashvin Gandhi, a professor and faculty associate at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, and they sometimes use “tunneling” practices to obscure true profitability.
By way of explanation, he told me a nursing home might sell its building and land to a sister company, and then pay inflated rent to that company. Or it might contract with another sister company for management services and pay inflated rates. The same can be done with food services, say, or laundry services.