Community Services Are Cost Effective

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Thanks and a hat tip to Steve Gold:

Two recent studies/reports document the many ways Medicaid's
Community-Based Long Term Care Services are cost-effective as compared to
expensive institutional nursing facilities:
   1.  "Do Non-Institutional Long-Term Care Services Reduce Medicaid
Spending?" written by H.S Kaye, M. LaPlante, and C. Harrington.  It is in
the journal Health Affairs, vol 28, no 1 (Jan/Feb 2009).
http://content.healthaffairs.org/index.dtl

   2.  "Taking the Long View: Investing in Medicaid Home and
Community-Based Services Is Cost-Effective" written by R. Mollica, E.
Kasser, L. Walker, and A. Houser. It is in the publication entitled
INSIGHT on the Issues, vol I26 (March 2009), a publication of the AARP
Public Policy Institute.  www.aarp.org/ppi

Do your legislatures really want to save Medicaid funds?
As your legislatures discuss/threaten reducing Medicaid expenditures and
as they do not discuss "rebalancing" institutional versus community-based
expenditures but want to keep people unnecessarily institutionalized,
these two reports from nationally recognized and extremely well-respected
organizations support your arguments.
Are your newspapers and editorial boards aware of the overwhelming data
that exists?  Are legislators and their staff aware?  Probably not. Meet
with them and share these reports with them.
Do you Congressional representatives and U.S. Senators, who still do not
support the Community Choice Act, know that the CCA will be cost
effective?  Again, probably not.
Advocates - use the above two reports!
   Steve Gold, The Disability Odyssey continues