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In all years since 2016, there have been at least 0.5 million people on waiting lists or interest lists for Medicaid home care, with a total of almost 650,000 in 2026. This data note provides new information about these waiting lists based on findings from KFF’s 50-state survey of Medicaid home care program officials.
Health care employment continues to grow even as hiring across other sectors has plateaued. The health sector added nearly 379,000 jobs over the past year, a 2% increase, compared with just 0.2% growth in other non-farm employment, with outpatient care among the fastest-growing health care settings.
In another concerning example of AI agents going rogue recently, an OpenAI agent hacked into an Australian government website containing health care data. While some industry CEOs are calling for a slowdown and demands for regulation grow, host Chip Kahn focuses on the implications for health care when these same kinds of AI systems are already at work in hospitals — in billing, in scheduling, and increasingly in decisions about patients.
Across the tech industry, many of AI's own leaders are calling for oversight — self-imposed or from government. That debate is on, but where it will land is anyone's guess. Joe Grogan takes a different tack: the biggest threat in health care AI may not be too little regulation, but the wrong kind.
Dr. Brian Miller has seen medical technology regulation from every side — as a hospitalist, a former FDA official, and now an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he leads a research group on market-driven approaches to FDA regulation and Medicare payment policy. In this episode, Chip talks with Miller about what happens when the FDA applies its 1976 medical device framework to AI — a technology that learns and changes.
At the close of every episode, Chip asks his guests the same question: ‘What keeps you up at night?’ In this highlights episode, we share intriguing responses on AI’s role in health care. From deepfakes and misinformation to bias and the risk of losing the human connection at the heart of care, these highlights capture some of the top issues today.
AI is racing into everyday medicine. The rules of the road are still being written. Dr. Michelle Mello of Stanford, professor at both the Law School and the School of Medicine, and co-leader of its Healthcare Ethical Assessment Lab for AI, joins Chip to address the questions that trail every advance this series has covered: who makes the rules, who ensures the technology gets it right — and who answers when it doesn't?
Caroline Pearson, executive director of the Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI) and the Peterson Center on Healthcare, joins Chip to discuss who really benefits as AI moves into health care's back office. A quiet arms race is underway — providers deploying AI to code, bill, and capture revenue and insurers deploying it right back to review, deny, and hold the line. The open question is whether any of this lowers what the country actually spends…
This analysis uses the 2024 American Community Survey (ACS) to provide an overview of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the direct care workforce, including home health aides, personal care aides, and nursing assistants who work in nursing facilities, residential care facilities, home health, and settings that provide nonresidential services for older adults and younger adults with disabilities.
In a conversation focused on the technology underlying AI in health care, Chip is joined by Seema Verma, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and now Executive Vice President and General Manager at Oracle Health and Life Sciences, the second largest electronic health records (EHR) platform in the U.S. Seema shares her insights on the evolution of EHRs and why it’s necessary to redesign these systems to better integrate AI capabilities and improve the quality of care.
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