Expanding Home-Based Health Care in Traditional Medicare

This project aims to examine the history of the Medicare home health benefit and identify how it can be expanded to comply with current law to meet the growing demand for home health care services. The project will include a literature review; stakeholder interviews; and a roundtable with providers, consumer organizations, health plans, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to summarize the legislative and regulatory history of the home health benefit and identify how the benefit has been eroded over time. It also will provide a summary of the literature on the cost savings, outcomes, racial disparities, and utilization of the benefit in order to develop policy recommendations to improve and expand the benefit to ensure the integrity of the program without restricting beneficiary access.