Nursing home care may get more expensive for some residents of the facilities if Congress acts to cut funding for the Medicaid program, which Republican leaders are attempting to do right now.
The hefty annual cost of the Medicaid program, amid a Republican desire to fund some tax cuts, makes it a likely Congressional target for scaling back. According to actuaries from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Medicaid spent $871 billion in total in 2023, an increase of 7.8% from $808 billion the previous year.
That high cost, coupled with the fact that some members of Congress believe that Medicaid should return to its roots of providing health insurance to poor children, pregnant women and the disabled, makes the Medicaid program a likely target for potential cuts to fund other policy priorities.
But Americans currently lean heavily on Medicaid for long-term care because the individual cost of that care is so significant making it politically difficult to reduce benefits or coverage of the insurance program. The agency spent $64 billion in total on nursing home care , while the out-of-pocket cost per month for nursing facility care ranges on average from $9,277 per month for a semi-private room or $10,646 for a private room, according to Genworth Financial,.
Still, the politics of cutting Medicaid is so complicated that there’s no certainty that it will be passed, said Nick Hut, senior editor for HFMA.
“The House still has to actually, vote on the bill,” Hut said. “It’s not guaranteed to pass because of divisions within the Republican caucus. And then the Senate has to agree to all the provisions,” he said.
And if the bill does go through and become law, any drastic fall off in public funding of nursing home care probably would not happen immediately.
“It would take several years for the impact to be felt, and there could be ways to make up any shortfall such as through reallocations of state funding,” Hut said.