More Ohio seniors choose home over nursing homes

COLUMBUS

The number of older Ohio residents getting long-term Medicaid care in their own homes and communities instead of nursing homes has more than quadrupled since 1993, new data from the Scripps Gerontology Center show.

The shift, fueled in large part by the expansion of the state’s Passport program, has cut Medicaid spending while increasing the number of people served by nearly 10,000 a day.

“One of the amazing things to me is that we’re serving nearly 7,000 fewer people over age 60 in Medicaid-funded nursing homes than we did 15years ago,” said Bob Applebaum, director of the Long-Term Care Research Project at Scripps and one of the authors of the report.

“That’s a decrease of nearly 15 percent. At the same time, the state’s population of people over 60 increased 15 percent.

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