Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
How does Medicare Advantage market share impact skilled nursing facility (SNF) profitability? That is the question asked by Marr and Shen (2024). Using data from Medicare SNF cost reports, LTCFocus.org data, and county MA penetration rates, the authors use an ordinary least squares regression with SNF and year fixed effects examining how MA penetration impacts…
A great paper by Gruber et al. 2023 looks at the evolution of long-term care for ten countries: Canada, Denmark, England, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain and the United States. Long-term care is divided into three categories: institutional care, formal home care, and informal care. For the 10 countries examined, the paper finds…
My paper with co-authors Shanshan Wang and Kirk Kirr just came out in the Journal of Long-Term Care titled Wound-Specific Oral Nutritional Supplementation Can Reduce the Economic Burden of Pressure Injuries for Nursing Homes: Results from an Economic Model. The abstract is below. Background To measure the cost savings and staff time savings of wound-specific…
An interesting article by Mor (2023) examines the history of the requirement for a 3-day hospital stay for Medicare to cover a skilled nursing facility (SNF) transfer. The 3-day requirement: …was introduced very early in the history of the Medicare SNF benefit at a time when most nursing homes (NHs) offered primarily custodial care and…
No, this is not coming nation-wide, but it may be on its way in California. Kaiser Health News reports: A provision in California’s newly approved state budget will eliminate the asset test for the 2 million Californians enrolled in both Medi-Cal and Medicare, the federal health insurance program for people 65 and older and people…
There are a few sub-questions we need to break down to answer before answering this one larger question. These sub-questions include: Is nursing staff turnover at nursing homes a big problem? Is nursing staff turnover correlated with quality of care? Does using nursing staff turnover as a quality metric provide the right incentives? A paper…
Interesting findings from an NBER working paper by Cronin and Evans (2020): Higher-quality nursing homes, as measured by inspection ratings, have substantially lower COVID-19 mortality. Quality does not predict the ability to prevent any COVID-19 resident or staff cases, but higher-quality establishments prevent the spread of resident infections conditional on having one. Preventing COVID-19 cases…
An interesting article on the Marketplace Morning Report last week dives into the topic. Hundreds of nursing homes around the country have shut down leaving states to deal with what to do with people who need long term care…In Massachusetts, lawmakers have extended a $50 million lifeline to keep some nursing homes open. One nursing…
As the U.S. ages, more and more individuals have chronic conditions or functional limitations which may at some point require senior housing, such as independent or assisted living facilities and nursing homes. The question is, will individuals be able to afford this type of housing? According to a paper by Pearson et al. (2019), the…
In the past few weeks, I discussed how well Hospital Compare does on measuring the quality of hospital care (see here and here). Now, I turn to how well Nursing Home Compare does on truly measuring quality of care. A study by Brauner et al. (2018) attempts to answer this question. They compare the quality…