Centre County is providing a financial boost of up to $2 million to Centre Care in an effort to help ensure the nonprofit nursing home can continue to provide affordable long-term care to local residents with limited financial resources.
The Board of Commissioners on Tuesday approved a $900,000 grant to Centre Care, to be followed by an additional $500,000 pending the completion of certain milestones related to development and fundraising in the coming months. The money will come from the last of the county’s American Rescue Plan funds.
An agreement is also being finalized for the county to acquire 14 acres of Centre Care property adjacent to the nursing home in College Township for $600,000.
“We look forward to showing you and the members of the community over the next few months and years what these dollars can do to help us continue our mission to take care of our residents and give exceptional care to our residents regardless of their financial means,” Centre Care Administrator Andrew Naugle said.
The infusion of cash will seed Centre Care’s new Neighbors Supporting Neighbors Fund to aid residents who don’t have the resources to cover the cost of their care, which Medicaid does not fully reimburse. Commissioners urged Centre County residents and businesses to support the fund as well and help secure the long-term viability of Centre Care as a nonprofit nursing home with a majority of Medicaid residents.
Commissioner Mark Higgins said that after the $2 million package, “there will be no further county funds available to support Centre Care.”
“The future of Centre Care and longterm Medicaid skilled nursing care in Centre County rests in the hands of the community,” Higgins said. “We’re calling on residents, businesses and organizations to step up and provide the long term charitable support needed to sustain Centre Care as a nonprofit facility. Your support can make the difference between keeping Medicaid beds available in Centre County or losing them forever.”
Centre Care is one of only three in Centre County — and just a few in all of central Pennsylvania — that accepts Medicaid, and is by far the largest. An average of about 75% of its 240 beds are for Medicaid residents, fulfilling a pledge Centre Care’s board made when it took over the formerly county-owned Centre Crest nursing home in 2014.
Nursing homes everywhere that accept Medicaid, however, are facing what Higgins called a “crisis.” Despite Pennsylvania legislators upping reimbursement rates, Medicaid coverage still falls well below the cost of long-term nursing home care, and at Centre Care the average gap in coverage is about $125 per day per resident.
“We must act now to prevent this crisis from worsening,” Higgins said.
Many nursing homes that supported Medicaid residents have closed or been sold to for-profit corporations, Higgins said, and once those Medicaid beds are lost “they will never return.”
“Imagine reaching a point in life where you or a loved one require skilled nursing care, only to find there are no affordable beds available,” Higgins said. “This is not a hypothetical scenario; it’s a reality already affecting many counties surrounding Centre County… This crisis is now at our doorstep.
“The core issue is simple yet devastating. Medicaid reimbursement rates for skilled nursing care are too low to cover the actual cost of providing the care no matter how efficient you are. This has been an ongoing problem for almost two decades.”
The $2 million will help sustain Centre Care as a nonprofit for about two years, Higgins said, but it will need community support to survive years and decades into the future.
Centre Care is not currently operating at a deficit, having overcome COVID era challenges that put it in the red, and is not facing imminent closure, Naugle said.
But Centre County’s older population is expected to rise significantly in the coming years — one of the factors that led the nursing home to move in 2021 to a new facility on Persia Road from its aging former Centre Crest building in Bellefonte — and 21% of current Centre County residents age 60 and older have an annual income of less than $17,655.
“As the years progress and as the need for Medicaid residents increases in the community, there could be closures in the future of years to come if that would potentially not have funding from the community and individuals like the commissioners,” Naugle said.
The county funding came after a year of discussions involving attorneys, “pointed questions” from commissioners and, at one point, a turnaround consultant, Higgins said.
Commissioner Amber Concepcion called the funding a “carefully considered investment in the long term sustainability of what’s an absolutely crucial community institution.”
She noted that long-term care is expensive, and the need for Medicaid coverage could happen to many people.
“People eventually run out of their resources to pay for this, and then it’s Medicaid that fills that in,” Concepcion said. “When we think of who needs a Medicaid bed for end-of-life care, potentially that’s any of us or any of our parents may need that at the end-of-life or even for folks who may have long-term disabilities that are really severe… There’s no way we could take the risk of potentially losing these Medicaid beds in our community because there wouldn’t be a way to regain those Medicaid beds with that state funding.”
Commissioner Steve Dershem said the county “will be part of the conversation moving forward,” in a “partnership to engage the public,” but he added the county is not getting back into the business of operating a nursing home itself.
When the county operated Centre Crest, it received the second-lowest Medicaid reimbursement rates in the state because it is a governmental entity with taxing power, Dershem explained. Centre Care’s ownership of the nursing home, he said, “has saved the county tens of millions of dollars at this point.”
“It’s just something that we need and I don’t think we can emphasize enough the importance of what those 240 Medicaid beds means to our community,” Dershem said. “If those beds go somewhere else, they evaporate.
“We do not have a choice but to make sure we have adequate facilities for our seniors whenever they are need. I would say this is as high of a calling as anything we could get involved in right now. This is an incredible opportunity for us to make sure this facility thrives into the future.”
