Skilled Nursing News January 16, 2026
A Medicaid policy that incentivized greater staffing, with bonus reimbursements up to $38.68 per resident day and based on acuity-adjusted staffing levels, resulted in a 12.2% increase in nurse staffing compared to the baseline level.
There’s evidence to suggest the Illinois reform impacted patient health, with 90-day hospitalization rates decreasing by 0.51 percentage points compared to other states, according to a study published in JAMA Health Forum.
“In this case-control study, we found that a Medicaid policy that incentivized high staffing levels was associated with modest improvement in some dimensions of patient health,” researchers said in the report. “However, even modest effects are extremely meaningful at scale: these estimates suggest that if a similar reform were adopted nationally, there would...
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