Assisted Living Cuero Texas

The average person on the street is likely not even aware that the government has been hard a work since 2007 to move people out of nursing homes and back into the community. Money Follows the Person is the name of a federal program that provides grants to assist Medicaid recipients to leave nursing homes, if they desire, to return to living on their own.  This program has helped nearly 17,000 people move out of nursing homes and into apartments, homes or assisted living facilities. 

In October of 2010, Medicaid regulations adopted a mandate that requires that nursing home residents be asked “Do you want to talk to someone about the possibility of returning to the community?"  The mandate requires the question be directed to the patient (or their family if the are not mentally compentent) every three months and when there is a significant change in the person's condition. 

While this trend toward nursing home exodus continues to grow, some reading this may be cheering and others are likely deeply concerned, especially those who know first hand how very difficult it can be to work through the decision of actually moving into a nursing care facility in the first place. There are many questions about how successful this trend will be. 

Most of those exiting aren’t elderly; they’re younger people with disabilities, say both the Kaiser survey and a series of reports by Mathematica Policy Research in Cambridge, Mass., a nonpartisan research firm. Only about a third of those moving out are over age 65. They’re not the oldest old, either: Mathematica’s report last summer on about 1,300 elderly Money Follows the Person recipients found that the greatest number were under age 75 and only 20 percent were over age 85. So Mr. Murphy was an outlier.

It’s also true that older people are somewhat more likely than younger adults to find that they can’t manage the transition and to move back into nursing homes. Mathematica found that almost 14 percent of the elderly returned to institutions within a year (and about 11 percent died), compared with a rate of about 9 percent for the whole sample.

Paula Span looks at the details and shares some surprising data about satisfaction with nursing home care.  You can read more here & here.