Looking Beyond Medicare's Nursing Home Ratings: What You Really Should Know Before Picking a Facility

This week, The New York Times published an investigative report by Katie Thomas on Medicare’s five-star rating system for nursing homes.  Among its findings: Medicare’s Nursing Home Compare tool relies largely on self-reported data by the facilities themselves and is thus unreliable.

On one hand, this is a bit odd, since Medicare’s website explicitly describes these very shortcomings.

On the other hand, the article (which will get a lot of attention because it is The New York Times) may encourage consumers to look beyond Medicare’s rating system. And that would be a good thing.

But the real problem is not that Medicare takes facilities’ word for it when it comes to quality. The real problem is that too often it is measuring the wrong things. The lesson is simple: The five-star rating system is useful (if flawed), but a wise consumer should see it as only one tool in the search for the best possible facility. After all, who’d buy a car based only on its government fuel-efficiency rating?

Full Article and Source:
Looking Beyond Medicare's Nursing Home Ratings: What You Really Should Know Before Picking a Facility

See Also:
Nursing Home Medicare Rating System Based on Unverified Data