HHS awarded $25 million to Illinois, Kansas, New Hampshire, American Samoa and Puerto Rico to expand access to home- and community-based services through Medicaid's Money Follows the Person program.
"Money Follows the Person has a proven track record of helping seniors and people with disabilities transition safely from institutional care to their own homes and communities," CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure said in a news release shared with Becker's. "Letting 'money follow the person' is key to those successes and to the Biden-Harris Administration's commitment to affordable, accessible, person-centered care."
Four notes:
- This is the first time this program has been made available to U.S. territories.
- Forty-one states and territories now participate in MFP.
- A CMS report found MFP helped facilitate more than 107,000 transitions out of institutional settings since 2008.
- CMS also found that 85 percent of people using Medicaid long-term services in 2019 received home- and community-based services rather than institutional services, according to the release.