Nursing homes have shed at least 3,000 jobs in recent months in the wake of cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, two recent surveys show.

The Ohio Health Care Association said that the 60 percent of its members who responded to a survey reported more than 2,800 job cuts. That represents about 8 percent of their staff, said Peter Van Runkle, OHCA’s executive director.

LeadingAge Ohio, meanwhile, said 25 of its nonprofit nursing home members in recent weeks attributed the loss of 312 jobs to cuts in state Medicaid reimbursement to nursing homes. Those rate cuts averaged 5.8 percent per patient.

Medicare in October cut its rates by 11 percent. That move came after reimbursement changes a year earlier that were supposed to be cost-neutral, but cost the government program $4 billion more than expected.

The Ohio Health Care Association wants the Medicare rate cuts phased in over time.

The impact of the Medicare cuts will be uneven, said Bob Applebaum, director of the Ohio Long-term Care Research Project at Miami University’s Scripps Gerontology Center. Some facilities that had seen a significant boost in Medicare reimbursement in October 2010 will come out ahead, he said, while for other facilities, “the reimbursement cuts will be really damaging.”

Applebaum said he’s seen the Ohio Health Care Association’s survey, and said not all of the 2,800 job cuts can be attributed to reimbursement cuts. Other factors included cutting staff who weren’t performing up to expectations and seasonal work force adjustments.

“Facilities lose staff all the time for lots of reasons,” Applebaum said.

State officials said only three Medicaid nursing home facilities have closed so far this fiscal year, in line with the number of closings in the first five months of the previous two fiscal years.

“So far, we are not seeing a spike in closures,” Eric Poklar, spokesman for Gov. John Kasich’s Office of Health Transformation, said in an email.

Declines in nursing home employment are being offset by hiring in the home health care sector, Poklar said.

But John Alfano, president and CEO of LeadingAge Ohio, said there’s no doubt that reimbursement cuts will have a long-term negative impact on quality of care, not to mention nursing home employees.

Half of the respondents to the LeadingAge survey said they will freeze or cut wages in 2012.