How Medicaid Helps Older Americans

The brief’s key findings are:

• Medicaid provides low-income retirees with critical health benefits by offering insurance directly, covering Medicare costs, or paying for long-term care.
• Recently, the Medicaid expansion has also helped reduce the uninsured rate among workers nearing retirement.
• The need for this array of benefits will grow as the population ages and medical costs continue to rise faster than household incomes.
• But older Americans are only a small part of Medicaid, so their future depends on the outcome of the broader debate over the program’s size and scope.