“A physician homebuilder tries to upend the nursing home industry — and give seniors back their independence,” by Bob Tedeschi, STAT
“‘I spent my career trying to change the nursing home industry,’ [Dr. Bill Thomas] said. ‘But I’ve come to realize it’s not really going to change. So now what I’ve got to do is make it so people don’t need nursing homes in the first place. That what this is about.’ The idea sounds, in one sense, simple: create and market small, senior-friendly houses like this one and sell them for around $75,000, clustered like mushrooms in tight groups or tucked onto a homeowner’s existing property so caregivers or children can occupy the larger house and help when needed. Thomas wants to help people grow older on their own turf and terms, while helping spare them the fiscal and physical stress of maintaining bigger homes.”
LTC Comment (from Stephen A. Moses, President, Center for Long-Term Care Reform):
Bill Thomas’s creative efforts to reform nursing homes, the Eden Alternative and the Green House project, were stymied by the LTC service delivery market’s dependency on revenue from poor public programs. His newest idea has promise as it could be funded by a carve out from home owners’ equity, a gigantic resource. But, here we go again. Medicaid’s home equity exemption, now up to as much as $858,000 continues to discourage private LTC financing and to channel chronically ill people into underfunded Medicaid nursing homes.
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