Skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) have been maligned in the press and in the business community as an obsolete care setting for the elderly. Valuations have historically been low. But with the advent of health care reform, they are poised to take center stage in the post-acute arena. As a result, smart buyers are driving up the price as they learn to segment out the profitable Medicare side of the business from the low-profit (and often no-profit) Medicaid side, which dominates the census of most skilled nursing facilities. The author shows how acquisition values can be divided up by census type, proving that high acuity skilled nursing Medicare beds are worth almost as much as inpatient rehab hospital beds or long-term acute care hospital beds, which have usually been valued at three to five times higher. This had never been analyzed and explained before.
