Reframing Nursing Home Reform as a Housing Issue

In both the public and policymaker imagination, nursing home reform is strictly a health care issue, the domain of state health departments and the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). But the prevalence of subpar nursing homes — and lack of empowering, person-directed alternatives to an aging long-term care infrastructure — is just as much the result of housing policy as health care regulations.

Well-known LTC researcher David Grabowski of Harvard University returns to “Elevate Eldercare” to discuss his increasing focus on the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as a key lever for eldercare transformation. By tweaking a few of the incentives that HUD currently offers nursing home operators, and implementing strict oversight to ensure the proper use of any additional funding, Green House homes and other alternatives could rapidly enter the marketplace.

Grabowski also walks through some of the progress made by the Moving Forward Coalition, a broad-based group seeking to implement the recommendations made in a sweeping 2022 report on the state of U.S. nursing home care from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM).

Learn more about the Moving Forward Coalition, including the new action plans: https://movingforwardcoalition.org/taking-action/#ActionPlans

Register for Change the Incentives, Change the System, a December 7 webinar on how small Medicaid policy changes can ignite innovation, here: https://thegreenhouseproject.org/projects/change-the-incentives-change-the-system-a-green-house-medicaid-case-study