Executive Summary
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) and Medicaid expansion have helped improve access to home and community-based services (HCBS), as Senior Attorney Elizabeth Edwards explains in this paper. Edwards writes that states that expanded Medicaid added significantly fewer people to HCBS waiting lists compared to the states that did not expand Medicaid, even though expansion states greatly outnumber non-expansion states. In fact, Edwards writes, nine of the 11 states that report they have no waiting lists are expansion states and the states with the longest waiting lists have not expanded Medicaid.
