From UCSF in the News...

San Francisco's effort to spend roughly $600 million to replace the out-of-date Laguna Honda nursing home with a huge new one bucks a tenuous trend across the country to care for the elderly at home instead of financing their care in isolated nursing homes. Martin Kitchener, a professor of health policy and management at the University of California, San Francisco, argues that home care is cheaper and more desirable for residents. Kitchener published a study last year in the Journal of Health and Social Policy that found average Medicaid costs for home care may be almost a third less than for nursing homes. Kitchener says if the cost is less for home care, there's "no argument" for replacing nursing homes like Laguna Honda with bigger ones. His staff surveyed states' waiting lists for home care and found them growing to more than 262,000 people nationwide in 2005 from 194,000 in 2002.

Full story is in the Wall Street Journal - link below. Note, there is a subscription cost for the Wall Street Journal.