Center in the News

“The level of unmet need is pretty staggering,” Kathryn G. Kietzman, the lead study author, said in an interview. “There’s a big void in what is available to folks.”

“Older adults and adults with disabilities are often stretched thin financially,” said Kathryn Kietzman, director of the center’s Health Equity Program and co-author of the research. “They’ve cut back on spending and even borrowed money but are still struggling to afford housing and food. For many, paying for any amount of caregiving help is out of reach.”

In two new studies, Kietzman and Lei Chen, a graduate student researcher at the Center, analyzed the need for long-term services and support among adults age 65 and older and adults with disabilities and assessed the financial constraints that limit options for such supportive care. The studies used data from the 2019–20 California Long-Term Services and Supports Survey (LTSS), a follow- to UCLA CHPR’s California Health Interview Survey (CHIS).

“If I’m a lucky American who has employer-based healthcare, and I go to a doctor who every year says, ‘OK, here’s what's on the list of things you need to know and that we need to check on,’ I’m going to have a much better chance of doing the preventive measures, or identifying a risk factor, or treating it early and avoiding worse outcomes,” says Kathryn Kietzman, Ph.D., director of the Health Equity Program at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, in Los Angeles. “But, if someone without healthcare has something like hepatitis B or hypertension, which can go undetected for years, they