Luxurious Amenities to Lure Medicare Patients

In a cutthroat race for Medicare dollars, nursing homes are luring patients who are leaving a hospital and need short-term rehabilitation with luxuries such as decadent baths and calming waterfalls.  Yet, even as nursing homes invest in lavish living quarters, the quality of care is very uneven.  Many of the homes are unable to provide the intensive medical care that rehabilitation requires.

The Department of Health and Human Services released a report in 2014 indicating that 22 percent of Medicare patients who stayed in a nursing facility for 35 days or less experienced harm as a result of their medical care.  Experts say that nursing homes were not built for this purpose; many patients leave hospitals with acute medical needs. 

Competition for these patients has become intense because Medicare pays 84 percent more for short-term patients than nursing homes generally get from Medicaid for long-term patients. 

See Katie Thomas, In Race for Medicare Dollars, Nursing Home Care May Lag, The New York Times, Apr. 14, 2015.

Special thanks to Lewis Saret for bringing this article to my attention.