Searching for a nursing home is not easy. You want a facility that will provide the care your elderly loved one needs, but you also want to make certain it fits your budget.
While you can search online to find all the amenities a nursing home offers, you may have noticed that very few facilities reveal their price on their website. To find out how much the facility will cost often requires a visit, a tour and a discussion. Hours may be lost only to find that the price is out of your budget. This can be very frustrating.
Is There A Reason For The Lack Of Transparency?
For years, lack of transparency in nursing home costs has been a major complaint. Even Consumer Reports, in its special report on elder care, listed “Make price and quality information transparent” among six necessary protections for consumers. Why then, does this continue to be a problem?
According to an article from Forbes, nursing homes claim that showing prices on their websites is not possible because prices vary depending on the resident’s needs. For this reason, any prices listed would be inherently inaccurate.
However, proponents for transparency in nursing home prices argue that nursing homes could, at the very least, display a base rate or price range on their website. In fact, research shows that the few nursing home websites that were upfront about pricing did better in terms of converting prospects into residents.
Nursing Home Care Is Expensive, But There May Be Help
Most people researching nursing homes know that this is going to be a huge cost, regardless of whether they can see the exact price on the facility’s website. What many people do not know is that they may be able to use Medicaid to help cover nursing home residency, and that Medicaid planning may be extremely beneficial.