Who Will Have Unmet Long-Term Care Needs and How Does Medicaid Help?

The brief’s key findings are:

• A growing concern is whether retirees will have enough family and financial resources to meet their future long-term care needs.
• This study builds on our prior work to estimate the share of 65-year-olds likely to fall short and the extent to which Medicaid will help.
• The results show more than a third of retirees will have moderate or severe needs that they cannot cover on their own, but Medicaid reduces this share to a quarter.
• Medicaid is especially helpful in closing the gap for those with limited resources: unmarried women, those with no college degree, and Blacks and Hispanics.
• These results alone do not tell the full story, as those who fall short do so to varying degrees and falling short is much harder on those with severe needs.