Nursing home costs in Hawaii are 44 percent higher than the national average, according to a new report from MetLife.

A private room at a nursing home costs $306 a day in Hawaii, compared to the national average of $212 a day.

The 2008 MetLife Market Survey of Nursing Home and Assisted Living Costs found that the nationwide average rates for a private room in a nursing home remained almost unchanged from 2007.

Alaska had the highest daily average at $577. Meanwhile Louisiana had the lowest at $127 a day.

The monthly average rate for assisted-living communities in Hawaii is nearly 18 percent higher than the national average, according to the report.

Assisted-living communities in Hawaii cost on average $3,566 a month, compared to $3,031 nationwide. Southern Maine had the highest average monthly base rate at $4,708, meanwhile North Dakota had the lowest rate at $1,980.

According to China’s official media, the senior population over 60 years old has reached 149 million. Many rest homes in large cities have few available beds. Population control programs have significantly reduced the number of children able to support older family members.

China News Web reported that the senior population over 60 years old in China accounts for 21.4 percent of the world’s senior population, ranking first in the world. At the beginning of the 1990s, 10 young people supported one elderly person in China. However, the ratio now is three-to-one. Because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has imposed the one-child policy for decades, both elderly parents rely on one child. So the resources for senior care are diminishing in every family.
A survey showed that 20 percent of the elderly wish to live in rest homes. However, the current number of beds in rest homes can only provide for less than one percent of the total senior population.

In early 2006, there were more than 39,500 organizations and 1,497,000 beds for the elderly in China, which included social welfare homes, homes for the elderly, nursing homes, elderly apartments, and elderly care homes, including more than 29,680 rest homes and 895,000 beds in rural townships.
Shanghai is the first city in China to become an ‘aging’ city. It has nearly 3 million people over 60 years old, which is more than 20 percent of the city’s total population. This is nearly twice the national average. Many elderly people wish to enter their favorite rest homes, but actually, it is not easy.

It is reported that although the beds provided by Shanghai’s relevant organization had already been occupied long ago, there are still over 1,000 elderly people waiting for a room. Beijing has the same problem. It will require 20 years to solve the problem.

In addition, the aging population in Tianjin City has also been rapidly increasing in recent years. According to statistics, there are 1.56 million people over 60 years old in Tianjin, which accounts for 16.3 percent of city’s population, much higher than the national average of 11.6 percent. Among these elderly, nearly 160,000 need to live in rest homes, but there are less than 20,000 beds in the whole city. The supply is far less than the demand.
In China, the majority of elderly people live at home, especially in rural areas. Since the seniors have relatively less financial capability, the high cost of rest homes is a major restraint for living in a care facility.

The report, which was released this week, found that more than 90% of the nation’s nursing homes were cited for federal violations last year. While Georgia state officials say they agree with HHS’ assessment, they argue that the numbers look worse than they really are. A total 88% of Georgia’s nursing homes were cited, according to HHS. But speaking to Atlanta’s public radio station WABE 90.1 FM, a Georgia state health official said that most of those infractions were for minor offenses, like housekeeping and maintenance issues, or food issues.

Idaho health officials share much the same view of the HHS report. All of Idaho’s homes received a citation, according to the report. A CBS affiliate in Boise spoke to one Idaho health official who said that his state reports even the tiniest infractions, unlike other states. He notes that, while an average of 17% of nursing homes nationwide were cited for deficiencies that caused harm or danger to residents, that number was only 3% in Idaho.

Rhode Island fared much better than some other states, the report found. Some 76% of its nursing homes were cited for an infraction. And the average number of citations per home was 2.5, far lower than any other state in the union.

“It was gratifying to see that our state did better than anyone else with respect to the number and percentage of deficiencies,” Virginia Burke, president of the Rhode Island Health Care Association told McKnight’s.

But Burke, like her counterparts in other states, also doesn’t feel the survey process is entirely fair. It’s not a very good stand-alone measure of quality care, and a lot of it is arbitrary, she says.

“You have to look at a number of quality measures before you can make a broad statement about the quality of care in one state versus another,” Burke said.

More than 90 percent of nursing homes were cited for violations of U.S. health and safety standards last year, and for-profit homes were more likely to have problems than other types of nursing homes, federal investigators say in a report issued on Monday.

About 17 percent of nursing homes had deficiencies that caused “actual harm or immediate jeopardy” to patients, said the report, by Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Problems included infected bedsores, medication mix-ups, poor nutrition and abuse and neglect of patients.

Inspectors received 37,150 complaints about conditions in nursing homes last year, and they substantiated 39 percent of them, the report said. About one-fifth of the complaints verified by federal and state authorities involved the abuse or neglect of patients.

About two-thirds of nursing homes are owned by for-profit companies, while 27 percent are owned by nonprofit organizations and 6 percent by government entities, the report said.

Source: International Resource Report