People with Disabilities

This booklet of long-term care and disability research has been prepared by the Division of Long-Term Care and Aging Policy, Office of Family, Community and Long-Term Care Policy, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. It summarizes the results of the Division's research projects from 1989 through the present and highlights future plans.

This study analyzes Connecticut nursing home data on a current resident cohort, with particular attention to how many residents began their stays as private pay, but eventually spent down to Medicaid eligibility. It also estimates how many residents were Medicaid eligible prior to admission or became eligible at admission.

The purpose of this paper was to provide a synthesis and critique of current research on Medicaid spenddown. The primary goal was to ask what these studies could tell us about the extent to which persons incurred catastrophic expenses in nursing homes. A corollary goal was to examine how the data and research methods used in the various studies affected the "results" reported.

The repeal of many provisions of the 1988 Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act was due to subjective impressions about the usefulness to many elderly persons of the services covered by the law and to the omission of long-term care services.

This paper was requested as part of the National Academy of Sciences, Committee on National Statistics Panel to Evaluate the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). SIPP is sponsored by the Bureau of the Census and has been an ongoing longitudinal survey of the civilian non-institutionalized population since 1983.

This study was designed to provide comprehensive information about future long-term care needs in the U.S. Using data from the U.S. Decennial Census of Population and Housing, National Long-Term Care Survey and National Nursing Home Survey, the study developed detailed projections of the need for long-term care among the elderly in the years 2000, 2020 and 2040.

This report examines how many disabled elderly are at risk because they do not receive the assistance they need in basic self-maintenance activities. The source of data was the 1982 and 1984 National Long-Term Care Surveys.

Physical impairments are commonly believed to require relatively more active hands-on assistance with the activities of daily living (ADLs) while cognitive impairments use relatively more supervisory or standby assistance.

This paper looks at programmatic definitions of disability for federal disability programs by: (1) reviewing and examining major programmatic definitions of disability, and (2) describing complex eligibility processes by using the Social Security Disability Insurance program as an example.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the variability in estimates of disability in the U.S. elderly population as a function of differing definitions of physical disability and cognitive impairment.