Grandma: Sir, can I trouble you for a glass of warm milk? It helps me go to sleep.
Hal L.: You can trouble me for a warm glass of shut-the-hell-up! Now, you will go to sleep! Or I will PUT you to sleep. Check out the name tag. You're in MY world now, grandma!”
My introduction to the world of long-term care came not from a grandparent, nor a college course, nor from some formative teenage volunteer stint at a nursing home.
It came from a mustachioed Ben Stiller in what, 30 years later, remains my all-time favorite comedy: Happy Gilmore.
Hal L. (Stiller) is an abusive manager at a retirement home where Grandma Gilmore is forced to live when the IRS takes her house away. He’s over-the-top and psychopathic in a very Happy Madison kind of way. In one scene, he forces residents to knit $200 quilts; when one woman complains that her fingers hurt, he grabs her hand, assigns her to landscaping duty, then asks the other residents: “Anyone else’s fingers hurt?”
You hopefully know me well enough to understand that, unlike Hal, I’m not here to endorse quilt-sweatshops and elder exploitation. For anyone new here, I’m Eric Goldwein. I’m a former sports and health journalist turned public health professional and nursing home data specialist, now running 320 Consulting, where I turn messy inputs (think massive, million-row spreadsheets) into meaningful outputs — from the PBJ320 Nursing Home Dashboard to the NBA Heave Report.
The work spans everything from Genesis Healthcare to Giannis Antetokounmpo, but the process is the same: start with a question, follow the evidence, and find meaning in messy data.
Nursing homes are my primary focus. Since 2019, I’ve been digging into these massive government spreadsheets called payroll-based journals (PBJ) — billions of rows of nursing home staffing data, meaningless on their own, but powerful when pieced together and put in context. The data can tell a story about what millions of residents and staff at the ~15,000 nursing homes across the United States have gone through over the last decade and offer clues about what’s coming in the decade ahead. They can change minds, change policy, and change lives.
Nursing home staffing and other metrics impact you directly, even if you don’t realize it. Maybe your loved one, or your loved one’s loved one, lives in a nursing home. Maybe you’re a nurse. Maybe you’re an ombudsman. Maybe you’re a health care professional. Maybe you’re a U.S. taxpayer, helping foot an annual $191 billion bill for nursing homes and continuing care retirement communities. Maybe one day, if you’re lucky, you’ll be part of the 65+ population — that’ll be 23.5% of the U.S. by 2055 — and you’ll need to start thinking about your own long-term care needs.
The nursing home system is a microcosm of the U.S. health care system. It’s expensive, too-often cruel, and, well, complicated. I’m a public health professional, the son of two doctors, and this is my job — yet even I struggle to explain and understand what’s going on. But in this space I’ll give it a try.
That’s the idea behind The 320: making complicated and boring datasets a little less complicated and a little less boring, using a combination of words, data visualizations, conversations, and 1990s movie clips. The 320 will cover nursing homes, public health, the NBA, voting mishaps, absurdly long goooool calls, and whatever is on my mind. Posts won’t flood your inbox, but when something important or interesting surfaces, you’ll get something worth reading (or listening to). Whether you’re interested in PBJ staffing data or halfcourt shots, or you’ve just been guilted into subscribing by yours truly, I’m grateful that you’re here and excited for whatever this may become.
So welcome to The 320. You’re in MY world now, reader.
