Survey: 57% of Residential Care Facilities Shun Medicaid for Private-Pay

With most states facing Medicaid budget shortfalls, many publicly traded long-term care providers are making efforts to shift away from depending on government benefits programs or to avoid dependence on these programs from the start, and a recent survey shows that more than half of facilities don’t have any Medicaid patients.

Just 43% of RCFs have patients who receive Medicaid benefits, according to a report on the 2010 National Survey of Residential Care Facilities, say researchers from the National Center for Health Statistics, an arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

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From a survey sample of 3,605 facilities with four or more beds, the report says that nearly half (49%) of medium-size facilities, with 11 to 25 beds, have patients who are getting Medicaid benefits, while only 32% of the facilities with more than 100 beds have any patients using Medicaid benefits.

Larger facilities are more likely (91%) than the medium-sized RCFs (73%) to offer services such as occupational therapy, physical therapy, and transportation to medical or dental appointments, according to the researchers.

While patient use of Medicaid funding has been increasing over the years, “RCFs serve primarily a private-pay adult population,” the researchers say in the data brief.

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View the “Residential Care Facilities: A Key Sector in the Spectrum of Long-term Care Providers in the United States” data brief here.

Written by Alyssa Gerace