Medicaid Expansion Status and HCBS Waiver Waiting Lists

The Kaiser Family Foundation recently published a report on whether a state's adoption of the ACA Medicaid expansion for low-income adults affects the size of its HCBS waiver waiting lists. The full report can be found here. 

Some members of Congress and other policy makers have speculated that states that opted into the ACA Medicaid expansion would face funding challenges that would increase HCBS waiting lists.

The Kaiser report conclusively shows that whether a state opted in to the ACA Medicaid expansion or not has no affect on its HCBS waiver waiting list size. In fact, the two states with the largest HCBS waiver waiting lists in 2015 were non-expansion states.