Reports

This Guide highlights key disability concerns to officials and experts responsible for emergency planning in their communities. It seeks to assist them in developing plans that will take into account the needs and insights of people with disabilities before, during, and after emergencies. It also is designed to help emergency managers, planners, and responders make the best use of resources in the emergency preparedness planning process.

This survey contains daily private-pay rates for private & semi-private rooms in licensed nursing homes, monthly base rates for assisted living communities, hourly rates for home health aides from licensed agencies & agency-provided homemaker companion services, & daily rates for adult day services across the US. Costs for this survey were calculated for each service provider in an area & were aggregated across all providers to compute a statewide average cost.

Medicaid officials in every state are enacting a variety of cost cutting measures as states’ spending is projected to increase 28.7% in FY2012 to make up for the loss of federal stimulus money. The survey finds cost containment actions ranging from restrictions on payments to providers & benefits, to new copayments for beneficiaries & additional efforts to contain the costs of prescription drugs. States are also trying to make their programs more efficient through a number of procedures.

This Primer has been updated to include all relevant statutory, regulatory and other policy changes that have occurred in the last 10 years in Medicaid home and community services. Given the significance of recent changes, this Primer will be an even more useful tool for all those working to ensure that people with disabilities can live in the most integrated settings appropriate to their needs.

This Chart Book reports on nursing facility services provided to Maryland Medicaid beneficiaries aged 19 years and older. It summarizes demographic, service utilization, acuity, expenditure, and length of stay data for fiscal years 2006 through 2009. This Chart Book was prepared for the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and is intended to monitor trends. Hilltop updates the chart book annually.

This presentation, delivered by Charles Milligan to the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC) in Washington, D.C., addressed the issue of coordinating long-term care for persons eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid (dual eligibles). Milligan discussed Hilltop's research on Medicare/Medicaid cross-payer effects that found that Medicare and Medicaid financing do not align to promote home and community-based services.

This report, which was presented at the Long-Term Care Interest Group Colloquium at the June 2011 AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting in Seattle, Washington, discusses progress in rebalancing Medicaid long-term services and supports (LTSS) spending, how the Affordable Care Act can support states’ continued efforts to rebalance LTSS, and opportunities for future research to support continued system transformation.

This fourth and final report for the national evaluation of the FY05, 06, and 07 Real Choice Systems Change (RCSC) Grants presents findings for both FY05 and FY06 Systems Transformation (ST) grantees. The findings address how grant efforts progressed between initial and final implementation periods and whether those efforts resulted in the achievement of grant outcomes and ultimately transformation of state systems.

Shared decision-making provides an approach through which providers and consumers of health care come together as collaborators in determining the course of care. Research has shown that SDM increases consumers’ knowledge about and comfort with the health care decisions they make. By placing mental health consumers at the center of the decision-making process, SDM provides a model through which multiple calls for transformation of the mental health field might be answered.

Older Americans Adults (OAA) reauthorization presents a unique opportunity to make significant improvements to the advocacy provisions under the Act. This paper presents three dimensions and five principles that form the basis of advocacy under the OAA, and it offers seven recommendations to strengthen advocacy within the next OAA reauthorization. Virtually every program and funding stream created by the OAA requires that the entire aging network advocate on behalf of older Americans.