Secret Shopper Data on Private Prices in the Nursing Home Industry From 2008 to 2010

Nationwide nursing home private-pay prices at the facility-level have not been available for researchers interested in studying this unique health care market. This study presents a new data source, Caregiverlist, for private-pay prices for private and semiprivate rooms for 12,000 nursing homes nationwide collected between 2008 and 2010. We link these data to publicly available national nursing home-level data sets to examine the relationship between price and nursing home characteristics. We also compare private-pay prices with average private-pay revenues per day for California nursing homes obtained from facilities' financial filings. On average, private-pay prices were $224 per day for private rooms compared with $197 per day for semiprivate rooms. We find that nursing homes that are nonprofit, urban, hospital-based, have a special care unit, chain-owned, and have higher quality ratings have higher prices. We find average revenues per day in California to be moderately correlated with prices reported by Caregiverlist.