Connecticut Democrats have spent the last several months crisscrossing the state to warn residents about potentially devastating impacts of looming federal cuts to Medicaid. 

 

Medicaid is the country’s biggest health plan, covering more than 70 million Americans. Known as HUSKY in Connecticut, Medicaid covers roughly 1 million people in the state, according to the Department of Social Services, which equals just about 25% of the population.

 

States depend heavily on the federal government to pay for the program. The state’s Office of Policy and Management projects Connecticut will spend a total of $11.6 billion on Medicaid this fiscal year. The federal government contributed roughly $6.9 billion, or 59%, of that funding.

HIGHLIGHTS 

On April 11, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a Deregulation Request for Information (RFI) seeking public input on federal regulations that may be overly burdensome or outdated. This is a key opportunity for the care at home industry to speak up and influence future policy. 

As your national voice for home care, we are preparing comments—and we want to hear from you, our members. 

While the majority of hospice agencies work hard to provide good care, stories about those that fail to live up to their ethical or legal obligations have appeared in prominent journalistic settings in recent years. 

 

But if we dig deeper into quality, we see lots of questions about what quality hospice care really means. How can we define it, measure it, and make comparisons between providers that will be useful to consumers? And what can Academy members, individually and collectively, do about those hospices that diverge significantly from what we would consider minimum quality of patient care? What kinds of messages should hospices be delivering to their various publics about quality and about choosing the provider that will meet their particular needs?

While the post-pandemic nursing workforce is showing signs of stabilizing, high levels of burnout, stress and dissatisfaction continue to threaten long-term workforce stability, according to the National Council of State Boards of Nursing’s biennial 2024 National Workforce Study. 

 

The report surveyed more than 800,000 nurses in the U.S. and is considered the largest, most comprehensive report on the state of the nursing workforce.