That’s the cost of a year of private-room nursing home care in Connecticut, according to a survey by Genworth Financial, which appeared in the paper today via an AP article. The national median is $91,250.
That’s a lot of money. For comparison, the survey also provides the seemingly-cheaper cost of home health aide services, $45,760 at median — I say “seemingly-cheaper,” though, because that’s the amount for 44 hours/week of care, which assumes the scenario of a parent living with an adult child, who hires the aide while she works, and provides the care directly for the remainder of the 24/7 period. But the $45,760 is based on an hourly rate of $20 (which is already a bit suspect due to its being such a round number), so for true round-the-clock care, the cost is double that of a nursing home, at $175,200.
Is this a surprise? No. But there were two interesting items here. First, the survey reported only a 1% increase in costs for home health aides, and 2% for homemaker services, over a 5 year period, compared to 4% for nursing homes. What do you make of this? Partly, perhaps, a very soft job market has held wages down — but why the increase for nursing homes, then? Did these increases come not as a result of wage increases but increased staffing requirements due to state regulations? Have nursing homes increased their private-pay rates due to the cost-shifting that occurs to subsidize Medicaid patients?
And what’s more interesting is the significant nationwide variation. Connecticut, above, is 50% higher than the median (I didn’t even mention Alaska, at $281,415). The lowest is Oklahoma, at $60,225. Illinois is $74,450, while Wisconsin and Michigan are both $99K. This is a subject I know little about, but I imagine that there’s a lot feeding into these rate variances, from average wages to nursing home regulations, to the degree to which patients area covered by Medicaid.
So, interesting to chew on.
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