Chasing millions in Medicaid dollars, hospitals buy up nursing homes
The nursing home can afford these multimillion-dollar improvements partly because it has, for the past five years, been collecting significantly higher reimbursement rates from Medicaid, the state-
federal health insurance program for the poor... A wrinkle in Medicaid’s complex funding formula gives Indiana nursing homes owned or leased by city or county governments a funding boost of 30 percent per Medicaid resident. The money is sent to the hospitals, which negotiate with the nursing homes over how to divvy it up.
.. Nearly 90 percent of Indiana’s 554 nursing homes have been leased or sold to county hospitals in the past 14 years
.. Today, more than two-thirds of Indiana’s Medicaid long-term care dollars go to nursing homes. The U.S. average is 47 percent.
.. they say, it has provided incentives to steer patients to nursing homes rather than lower-cost options, such as home health care or community-based day-care centers.
.. a bad deal for the poor because it takes a large portion of Medicaid dollars targeted for services for low-
income nursing home residents and sends it instead to hospitals to use as they please... States pay no more than half the costs, although the federal match varies based on a state’s wealth.
.. All the Medicaid funding for nursing homes should be going to those homes to care for the poor, not shared with hospitals to use as they choose, he said.