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KFF designs, conducts and analyzes original public opinion and survey research on Americans’ attitudes, knowledge, and experiences with the health care system to help amplify the public’s voice in major national debates.
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Long-Term Care Costs Can Exceed Seniors’ Income Download Source MetLife Mature Market Institute. The 2012 MetLife Market Survey of Nursing Home, Assisted Living, Adult Day Services, and Home Care Costs, November 2012, available at: https://www.metlife.com/mmi/research/2012-market-survey-long-term-care-costs.html#keyfindings; U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2012 Annual Social and Economic Supplement, Table POV01.
States’ Participation in Six Key Medicaid Long-Term Services and Supports Options Provided or Enhanced by the Affordable Care Act Download Source M. O’Malley Watts, M. Musumeci, and E. Reaves, How is the Affordable Care Act Leading to Changes in Medicaid Long-Term Services and Supports (LTSS) Today? State Adoption of Six LTSS Options, The Henry J.
To help inform the ongoing debate, KFF conducted four focus groups in July and August 2021 with direct care workers and unpaid caregivers who provide HCBS, assisting seniors and people with disabilities with daily self-care and household activities. These focus groups are not necessarily generalizable to all caregivers, but can provide insight into their experiences to help inform current policy debates.
For some regions of the country, recent months have brought the worst COVID-19 outbreaks in long-term care facilities since the start of the pandemic, a new KFF analysis of state-reported cases and death shows, underscoring the importance of current efforts to vaccinate this high priority group.
This issue brief draws on features of the various existing Medicaid home and community-based services (HCBS) programs to identify key policy questions raised by initiatives to streamline Medicaid HCBS, ameliorate institutional bias, and improve administrative simplification.
This infographic highlights Medicaid’s role for seniors. It includes information about the senior population and highlights Medicaid’s role in increasing access to and financing treatment, particularly for long-term care. It also discusses the potential impact of proposals to limit federal Medicaid financing.
In a Health Affairs blog post, Joshua M.
This infographic highlights Medicaid’s role for nursing home care. It includes information about the nation's growing long term care need and the role Medicaid plays as the primary payer for nursing home care. It also discusses the potential impact of proposals to limit federal Medicaid financing.
Medicaid’s Money Follows the Person (MFP) demonstration has helped seniors and people with disabilities move from institutions to the community by providing enhanced federal matching funds to states since 2007. The program operates in 44 states and has served over 90,000 people as of June 2018. The program is credited with helping many states establish formal institution to community transition programs that did not previously exist by enabling them to develop the necessary service and provider infrastructure. With a short-term funding extension set to expire on December 31, 2019, MFP’s future remains uncertain without a longer-term reauthorization by Congress.
To financially qualify for Medicaid long-term services and supports (LTSS), an individual must have a low income and limited assets. In response to concerns that these rules could leave a spouse without adequate means of support when a married individual needs LTSS, Congress created the spousal impoverishment rules in 1988. Originally, these rules required states to protect a portion of a married couple’s income and assets to provide for the “community spouse’s” living expenses when determining nursing home financial eligibility, but gave states the option to apply the rules to home and community-based services (HCBS) waivers.
Section 2404 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) changed the spousal impoverishment rules to treat Medicaid HCBS and institutional care equally from January 2014 through December 2018. Congress subsequently extended Section 2404 through December 2019. This issue brief answers key questions about the spousal impoverishment rules, presents 50-state data from a 2018 Kaiser Family Foundation survey about state policies and future plans in this area, and considers the implications if Congress does not further extend Section 2404.
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