Assuring Quality Nursing Home Care: A Case of 'Market Failure'

Abstract

Current attempts to ameliorate nursing home market failure have proven inadequate. What is needed is a more dramatic economic empowerment of nursing home residents. Enhanced use of regulation, encouraging advocacy for nursing home residents, better dissemination of information about nursing home quality, and more aggressive ombudsmen programs would help. In the end, however, the only true solution to market failure is to attack it head-on by creating meaningful consumer choices for long-term care.

Keywords: nursing home reform, nursing home care, long-term care, elder care, market failure, quality of care, substandard care, public relations, costs, Medicaid, Certificate of Need program, competition, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services