Colorado

On August 18, 2005 CMS Administrator Mark B. McClellan, and Administration on Aging Assistant Secretary Josefina Carbonell announced $15 million in grants to 19 states to create a single source of information and assistance for families navigating the often confusing array of long-term care services. Part of the New Freedom Initiative, the ADRC grants are jointly administered by CMS and HHS’ Administration on Aging. A complete list of grantees and award amounts are included in the press release.

This report presents information aggregated from 13 F2F HICs and provides an early indication of the extent and importance of the activities of these critical family centers. The data indicates that F2F HICs are steadily increasing their capacity to document what they do. Both families and professionals frequently seek expertise and assistance from F2F HICs. The most common concerns reported relate to needs for adequate health care financing and links to community resources.

Medicaid is the major public payer of community services and supports for working age adults with serious mental illnesses. This handbook explains how existing Medicaid options and waivers are used by states to finance a broad range of community services and supports for adults with serious mental illnesses, and demonstrates what aspects of state-of-the art community services and supports for this population are funded by Medicaid.

This memorandum presents state-by-state data on Medicaid long term care expenditures in Federal Fiscal Year 2004 (October 2003 through September 2004). The accompanying tables present data on Medicaid Expenditures for Long-Term Care services from 1992 to 2004. A new table this year shows the effect of supplemental nursing facility payments in some states on expenditure data. A separate file ranks states based on the proportion of LTC spending for community services.

This entry presents data on Medicaid 1915(c) Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) waiver expenditures from Federal Fiscal Years 1999-2004. As in previous years, information is classified for each individual HCBS waiver by the target population served in order to present information on the distribution of HCBS waiver expenditures across long term care populations. Tables include waiver spending by target population; growth in spending; expenditures by state; distribution of expenditures.

The information in this paper supports the President's New Freedom Initiative initiative by describing how a state might use the Health Insurance Flexibility and Accountability (HIFA) waiver option under Section 1115 authority to improve access to community-based services for persons with mental illness. These services can include basic health care coverage, enhanced community-based supports, and provisions to encourage the use of employer-sponsored insurance (ESI).

Case study reports on programs in 9 states that received federal Nursing Home Transition Grants from 1998 - 2000 are now available. New reports describe programs, implementation, and lessons learned from transition programs in Arkansas, Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vermont, Michigan, Wisconsin and from a hospital to nursing home diversion program in Colorado.

This entry includes sample forms and results used to monitor direct care services for group, residential and day habilitation services and supports for people with developmental disabilities in Colorado. The surveys include both administrative and case management functions.

A wage pass-through is an additional allocation of funds provided through Medicaid reimbursement for the express purpose of increasing compensation for direct-care workers. Twenty-one states have implemented these programs in expectation that doing so will help address the worker shortage. The purpose of this issue brief is to: describe the structure in selected states; summarize what is known about the impact of these programs on recruitment and retention; and identify key design elements.

The sixth biennial edition of the AARP Public Policy Institute's databook, presents an overview of long-term care in each state plus the District of Columbia by using numbers, graphs, charts, and maps. Data includes each state's demographics, need for LTC and HCBS services, the number of LTC workers per thousand people aged 65 and over, urban average for private-pay home health aide wages, and CNA hours per resident day. Each state is compared with others through rankings and national averages.