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Increased payment rates for Medicaid home care workers are states’ key approach to addressing workforce shortages. This issue brief describes Medicaid payment rates for home care and other workforce supports that are in place in 2025, before the majority of the 2025 reconciliation law provisions start taking effect.
This issue brief provides an overview of what Medicaid home care (also known as “home- and community-based services” or HCBS) is, who is covered, and what services were available in 2025.
Medicaid home care programs offer various supports to family caregivers such as paid caregiving, self-directed services, respite care, and caregiver training. This issue brief describes the availability of self-directed services and supports for family caregivers in Medicaid home care in 2025, before most provisions in the reconciliation law take effect.
This data note discusses the impact of the 2025 reconciliation law on nursing facilities and examines the characteristics of nursing facilities and the people living in them with data from Nursing Home Compare, a publicly available dataset.
This brief provides an overview of premiums and benefits in Medicare Advantage plans that are available for 2026 and key trends over time.
This brief provides an overview of the Medicare Advantage plans that are available for 2026 and key trends over time. In 2026, the average Medicare beneficiary has a choice of 32 Medicare Advantage prescription drug (MA-PD) plans, two fewer than the 34 in 2025. Virtually all Medicare Advantage plans for 2026 provide multiple extra benefits like vision, hearing, and dental benefits, similar to last year.
This interactive provides the facts on Medicare spending. Medicare, which serves 65 million people and accounts for 12 percent of the federal budget and 20 percent of national health spending, is at the heart of discussions about health expenditures and affordability. Explore data on enrollment growth, Medicare spending trends overall and per person, growth in Medicare spending relative to private insurance, spending on benefits and Medicare Advantage, Part A trust fund solvency challenges, and growth in out-of-pocket spending.
Using data from the 23rd KFF survey of officials administering Medicaid home care programs, this issue brief describes the mechanisms states are currently using to limit Medicaid spending on home care and their plans for adopting new mechanisms in state fiscal year (FY) 2026.
This data note provides new information about waiting lists in Medicaid home care before many of the provisions in the 2025 reconciliation law go into effect. The data come from KFF's 23rd survey of officials administering Medicaid home care programs in all 50 states and DC.
In a new column, President and CEO Dr. Drew Altman discusses new KFF survey data that shows that a surprising share of older adults with Medicare are using health tech regularly, and a solid majority support many of CMS’ goals to make it more widely available. But there are also big income gaps in the use of health tech, and concerns about AI, privacy, and other barriers to rapid and more widespread adoption. “Apparently… a lot of Medicare beneficiaries—but not all beneficiaries equally—are ready for more health tech, and have become tech savvy to survive,” Altman writes.
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