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Dorevanti

How Dorevanti works

Dorevanti compares four ways to pay for care in your state: in-home care, assisted living, and a semi-private or private nursing home room. Every price comes from a published document, and every response lists the document, its vintage and the day it was loaded.

The method

  1. Each option starts from the state median annual price in the CareScout survey. In-home care is priced by the hour: the state median for 44 hours a week over 52 weeks, divided by those 2,288 hours. The hours in each year scale with how many of the six daily activities need help, from none to the survey's 44-hour week at six, unless you send your own hours.
  2. Prices grow each year at a rate cut from the history of CPI Medical Care Services. The median of all overlapping windows of your projection length in the last 30 years is the central case; the 10th and 90th percentile windows give the low and high cases.
  3. Each year's cost is weighted by the share of that year the person is expected to be alive, from the CDC 2024 life table (person-years lived over survivors at the starting age). A cost in a year the person is not expected to live to is not counted.
  4. Each weighted cost is discounted to today with the present value formula in NIST Handbook 135 (2020), Equation 3-5: PV = F / (1 + d)t, at the 10-year Treasury yield.
  5. The crossover is the first year in which a year of in-home care costs more than a year of assisted living, with both grown at the same rate.

The range

The range is three paths of decline (0.25, 0.5 or 1 more daily activity needing help each year, capped at six) against the three price-growth cases: nine scenarios. It is a scenario range, not a statistical interval. The three paths are authored scenarios; no published table gives a yearly rate, and every response lists them as authored.

Medicaid and VA

The Medicaid estimate follows 42 U.S.C. 1396r-5: a community spouse may keep the greatest of the minimum and the lesser of half the couple's resources and the maximum. It does not deduct the personal needs allowance or the community spouse's income allowance, and it does not model transfers inside the look-back period. The VA estimate follows the VA rule that the pension is the maximum rate less income after deductible care costs. Neither is a determination of eligibility.

What the numbers do not include

Housing and living costs at home (assisted living and nursing home fees include room and board), memory care (the survey prints no median), home modifications, medical care, the extra fees facilities charge for higher levels of care, and taxes. Where the survey prints N/A for a state, that option is left out and the response says so. The District of Columbia has no row in the survey.

Sources

Estimates are for planning. They are not financial, legal or medical advice; Medicaid and VA outcomes are decided by those agencies. Run the calculator.