Deborah Banda, state director of the AARP Massachusetts, said the findings underscore the urgent need for state leaders to address the soaring cost of long-term health care as they debate overhauling the way doctors and hospitals are paid.
“This really screams that we need to have affordability as a part of the discussion about payment reform,’’ Banda said.
The study also found that programs and services for families who care for loved ones at home are significantly lacking.
Despite a push by the Patrick administration to bolster home- and community-based care, the report gave Massachusetts low marks, ranking it 40th out of 50 states and the District of Columbia, for the percentage of low-income residents who end up in nursing homes without first receiving community-based care that might have allowed them to stay at home.
“This report tells us that we score very high on rhetoric but we are mediocre on performance,’’ said Al Norman, executive director of Mass Home Care, a network of 30 nonprofit agencies that focus on caring for patients in their homes.
“We tell the public that we want to take care of you at home,’’ Norman said. “But we don’t put our dollars where our rhetoric is.’’
The report found that Massachusetts spends about 39 percent of its long-term care money on services that would allow elders and disabled residents to be cared for in their homes, while the highest-ranked states allocate about 60 percent of their funds on home- and community-based care.
Dr. JudyAnn Bigby, the state’s secretary of Health and Human Services, said Massachusetts is committed to changing that equation and has improved since 2007, when it spent only 30 percent of its available money on community-based care.
Bigby said the state is hoping to create more community-based group homes for elders who need care but who prefer to stay in the neighborhoods where they have long lived.
She also said that the network of state and community agencies and organizations designed to help elders avoid nursing homes is fragmented and needs better coordination.
“There is more we can do about this,’’ Bigby said.
