 Personal Finance PowerPoint Presentation. Skilled Nursing Facility. Prepare to get financially fit by practicing personal finance. Insurance is part of our long-term risk mitigation strategy where we follow the adage of measure twice cut once, putting a formal process in place, looking something like, set the goals, develop a plan to reach them, put the plan in action, review the results, repeat the process periodically. Most of this information can be found at Investopedia, Skilled Nursing Facility, which you can find online. Take a look at the references, resources, continue your research from there. This is by Julia Kagan, updated November 20, 2020. In prior presentations, we've been taking a look at insurance. We moved to medical insurance. We then looked at long-term care. And now we're taking a look at Skilled Nursing Facilities in conjunction or alignment with that discussion. A Skilled Nursing Facility is an inpatient Rehabilitation and Medical Treatment Center staffed with trained medical professionals. They provide the medically necessary services of licensed nurses, physical and occupational therapists, speech pathologists and audiologists. Skilled Nursing Facilities give patients round-the-clock assistance with healthcare and activities of daily living. Those are the ADLs. There are numerous federal regulations regarding what Skilled Nursing Facilities can and cannot do. Skilled Nursing Facilities versus a nursing home. What are the differences? Typically, a Skilled Nursing Facility is a temporary residence for patients undergoing medically necessary rehabilitation treatment. A nursing home, on the other hand, is more often a permanent residence for people in need of custodial care 24-7. So when we're looking into these terminologies, you want to have an idea of what the differences are and what the options are to cover, if necessary, the Skilled Nursing Facility and the nursing home. So how a Skilled Nursing Facility works, any patient entering a Skilled Nursing Facility receives an initial health assessment as well as ongoing health assessments to evaluate physical and mental health medications and the ability to handle activities of daily living, such as bathing and getting dressed. Skilled Nursing Facilities and nursing homes are barred from discriminating against residents based on race, color, ethnicity, religion and sex and other protected characteristics. Skilled Nursing Facilities that violate the rules can be reported to authorities such as the local long-term care omnibus and state nursing home regulatory agencies, for example, a woman who suspects her mother was denied entry to a particular nursing home in California because of her race could report the incident to the California Department of Public Health. So if her mom doesn't have any other care options, she might take up the matter with the facility to try to get her mom admitted. So if there are other equally good options, she could also consider choosing another facility. Special considerations paying for a Skilled Nursing Facility. Patients needing post-hospital care in a Skilled Nursing Facility who are enrolled in Medicare and covered for stay up to 100 days in a Medicare-certified Skilled Nursing Facility if the patient meets Medicare's requirements. So if the Medicare is involved, remember we have Medicare and then we have the Medicaid. When we're talking about the Skilled Nursing Facilities, we're talking about the ones that are not for the forever kind of situation. That's more the rehabilitation stuff, which you would think would fall into the Medicare, which is kind of similar to, say, health insurance as opposed to the long-term kind of care facilities where you might need like a nursing home kind of situation where people would be for a longer period of time, which might not be covered by the Medicare and possibly that's when the Medicaid could fit in. But the Medicaid is more of a plan that is based for people whose income and asset levels are below a certain threshold as we've discussed in prior presentation. The facility or Medicare can use specific assessments to determine whether Medicare will pay for the patient's stay or the patient will be responsible for some or all of the cost. After the 100 days, patients are responsible for all costs, some or all of which can be covered, private insurance or Medicaid for those who are eligible. Skilled Nursing Facilities cannot charge a buy-in fee as some assisted living communities do and are required to put their services and fees in writing, give these details in advance to the patient or the patient's caregiver. Skilled Nursing Facilities can be extremely expensive for long-term stays In 2019, for example, a private home, a private room in a skilled nursing facility or nursing home cost an average of $102,200 a year according to a report on long-term care by Genworth. So if it goes over that threshold, if the insurance or the Medicare isn't covering it, then of course it gets quite expensive after that point in time and that's how it kind of fits into the discussion of the long-term care options that might be available in terms of, say, insurance or possibly Medicaid which we've been talking about in prior presentations.