Do the Best Nursing Homes Have to Be Expensive?
"Affordable nursing home," like "deafening silence" (or "healthcare system"), is an oxymoron. The U.S. national average cost of a nursing home, as reported by my colleague Michelle Andrews last week, is $203 a day, according to the latest survey by Genworth Financial. Few Americans can, well, afford to think of $74,000 a year as affordable.
Some nursing homes even cost considerably more than that. But does their higher cost mean they provide better care? Maybe so, especially at the local level, where nursing homes hotly compete and another few bucks per resident per day might pay for, say, more or better-paid nurses. But no one knows, and my impression from other new data (more on that in a moment) is that it doesn't account for significant variations in nursing home performance from state to state.
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U.S. News's Avery Comarow has been editor of the America's Best Hospitals annual rankings since they first appeared in 1990. His reporting on clinical medicine, from the latest cholesterol guidelines to robotic surgery, has been driven by the question: What does this mean to patients? And that is the perspective he brings to his observations and commentaries on the increasing number of programs by hospitals and other healthcare providers to improve care and patient safety.
