Effects of multiple admissions on nursing home use: implications for front-end policies

Recently, proposals to expand publicly financed nursing home benefits have focused on coverage for the initial months of care. This paper presents information from the 1985 National Nursing Home Survey to describe the phenomenon of multiple nursing home admissions and to examine the effects of multiple admissions on the number of individuals who would be fully covered by "front-end" policies. For example, in contrast to an expected 51% of admissions that would be fully covered by a 3-month benefit, we estimated that only 39% of cases would be fully covered after adjusting for multiple admissions.