The cost of residential care homes serving elderly adults

Given increasing expenditures for long-term nursing home care costs, the residential care home (RCH) provides a viable alternative for elderly Americans requiring daily supervision but not extensive care. Purposive and random sampling procedures were used to select 181 RCHs serving the elderly in five states in order to analyze their expenditures. Home operator interviews yielded facility and patient descriptors as well as expenditure data. Analyses of these data revealed total expenditures per resident month to be $330 in 1980 dollars. Based on multivariate analyses, measures of resident case mix were significantly related to food costs but not to staffing costs. Findings suggest that small homes commit more resources to resident care since operator labor is not an expenditure.