Kaiser Report on Medicaid

The Kaiser Family Foundation has a new report on Medicaid. Some passages relevant to people with autism and to the broader disability community:

Medicaid serves multiple roles in the health care system. Medicaid provides health coverage and long-term care services and supports for nearly 60 million low-income Americans including 29 million low-income children, 15 million adults and 15 million elderly and people with disabilities.

...

Half of Medicaid enrollees are children, but most Medicaid spending is for the elderly and people with disabilities. About three-quarters of the beneficiaries served by the program are children and non-disabled adults, mostly parents. The elderly and people with disabilities represent just one-quarter of the share of program enrollees, but account for nearly 70 percent of program spending because these groups tend to have higher utilization of acute and may use long-term care services (Figure 4). In fact, Medicaid data show that just five percent of Medicaid enrollees account for more than half (57 percent) of program spending.

...

This year’s survey found that states are continuing to work on reorienting their Medicaid LTC delivery systems towards more community-based services. States’ efforts to expand HCBS options for LTC are driven by consumer demand, the United States Supreme Court decision in Olmstead v. L.C. in June 1999 that stated that the unjustified institutionalization of people with disabilities is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and an effort to control LTC costs which represent a third of total Medicaid spending.