ABSTRACT
In 1981, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Commonwealth Fund provided the University of Pennsylvania with $300,000 to conduct a study of the Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC) industry. The study had three purposes: to study the industry from empirical, actuarial, and legal views. Empirically, we wanted to find out what was out there, how many communities there were, what the physical configurations were, what the fee structures were, who sponsors them, and so forth. Therefore, we engaged in a massive empirical analysis. We identified about 300 or 400 communities that met our definition of a CCRC i.e., a community where, if you go into the medical center, you do not pay the per diem rate. In other words, a CCRC has an insurance element to the contract. There are another several hundred communities which are strictly fee for service types of communities which we did not classify as part of our study.
