Long-Term Care

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 2024.

This issue brief describes states’ ongoing efforts to respond to shortages of home care workers and how they pay these workers, finding that increased payment rates are a key component of states’ efforts to address workforce shortages.

In 2025, many issues are at play that could affect Medicaid coverage, financing, and access to care.

This issue brief provides new information about family caregivers from KFF’s most recent survey of state Medicaid HCBS programs, including a discussion of paying family caregivers, self-direction, and supports available for family caregivers.

This data note examines the characteristics of nursing facilities and the people living in them with data from Nursing Home Compare, a publicly available dataset that provides a snapshot of information on quality of care in each nursing facility, and CASPER (Certification and Survey Provider Enhanced Reports), a dataset that includes detailed metrics collected by surveyors during nursing facility inspections.

This data note provides new information about waiting lists for Medicaid Home- and Community-Based Services, including a discussion of why waiting lists are an incomplete measure of unmet need and why they are not necessarily comparable across states or over time.

This issue brief presents findings from the focus groups including caregiver characteristics; physical, emotional, and mental caregiving demands of caregiving; their wages, finances, and opportunities for advancement; and what caregivers would like policymakers to know about their work.

On October 8, 2024, Vice President Harris has proposed to expand Medicare to provide home care to help families who are struggling with the costs of long-term care. If enacted, this would be the first major expansion of Medicare since the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 that added a prescription drug benefit to the program.