By Lisa Watts
Researchers are digging into big data to answer a deceptively basic question.
“It’s a common claim that Medicaid reimbursements to nursing homes are much less than the actual costs of providing care,” says Edward Miller, professor and chair of gerontology at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. “But when you try to look at documented empirical evidence, there’s not much there.”
Miller is working with Marc Cohen, clinical professor of gerontology and co-director of the LeadingAge LTSS Center @UMassBoston, and John Bowblis, professor of economics at Miami University of Ohio and a research fellow with the Scripps Gerontology Center, to develop that evidence. Their project, “Assessing Medicaid Rates and Costs in Nursing Facilities,” is funded by the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and managed by Sara Karon at RTI International.
The challenge the researchers face is that each state sets its own Medicaid reimbursement rates. The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services collects detailed, uniform information from nursing homes on their costs, making that side of the equation more straightforward to document. But on the reimbursement side, no organization systematically collects Medicaid reimbursement rates for nursing homes across all 50 states.
To learn more about the research project, visit the Gerontology Institute Blog.