Costs of community care for disabled elderly persons: the policy implications

Abstract

This paper presents results from our analysis of the National Long-Term Care Channeling Demonstration Project data. We used this data to estimate the costs of community-based long-term care services for disabled elderly persons. Our results indicate that both costs per community day and the likelihood that any costs would be incurred, would increase noticeably if a program similar to the Channeling project were implemented nationally. To illustrate the effects of disability-based eligibility criteria on total program costs, we present unit costs in conjunction with numbers of persons having different levels of ADL dependency.