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2025 Legislative Priorities

Adopt Presumptive Eligibility for Older Adults

LeadingAge California is leading the effort to implement Medi-Cal presumptive eligibility and provisional plans of care for adults aged 65 and older for home and community-based services.

Adopting presumptive eligibility for older adults will help eliminate barriers to accessing timely and appropriate care, reduce the risk of costly and avoidable hospitalization and/or institutionalization, and support individuals who wish to live in the most integrated community setting of their choice.

Presumptive eligibility implementation aligns with CalAIM’s broader population health goals by promoting early intervention and more efficient care delivery, ensuring better outcomes for vulnerable adults.

Train and Certify New Certified Nursing Assistants, Home Health Aides, and Health Care Social Workers

California is in dire need of additional support to bolster its older adult care workforce. Recent forecasts by UCSF project a statewide deficit of 40,567 nurses, nearly 3 times the amount of the next state with a shortfall.

LeadingAge California is committed to advocating for the expansion of programs to bolster the state’s nursing workforce and ensure that it is fully prepared to care for its quickly growing aging population. LeadingAge California strongly supports growing the career lattice for clinicians serving older adults.
 

Create a Rental Assistance Program for Older Adults

Older adults are becoming unhoused in record numbers. Nearly half of California’s unhoused population is age 50 and over. This is largely due to a rise in income inequality among older adults who have seen housing costs increase much faster than their fixed incomes.

On average, it takes two years to start accessing services when an older adult becomes unhoused. Unhoused older adults often have a functional health status of someone much older, exacerbating chronic disease and disability resulting in high utilization of our health care systems.

California’s Master Plan for Aging calls out housing and homelessness as a key initiative. Multiple state committees, including the MPA Impact Committee and the Disability and Aging Community Living Advisory Committee, have identified targeted rental subsidies as the top need for older Californians.

For the last three years, the Aging and Disability Homelessness Advocacy Coalition has been introducing a rental assistance bill (SB 37, authored by Senator Caballero last year). A coalition of stakeholders, including LeadingAge California, will be pursuing a rental assistance solution in 2025.
 

Expand Home Share Programs to Create More Housing Opportunities

Home Sharing–when people rent out extra rooms in their house or apartment–has great potential to help address California’s housing and homelessness crisis, especially among older adults.

Older adults are much more likely than other Californians to be housing rich but cash-poor; they may own their home but also have a limited fixed income that doesn’t completely cover all their costs. Home sharing can provide the additional benefit of remaining stably housed and aging in place for as long as possible for older adults. Across California, dozens of organizations facilitate home sharing, including many Area Agencies on Aging.

Incentivizing home sharing is a powerful, near-zero-cost way to increase housing supply and address the housing and homelessness crisis, especially among older adults. Ways to incentivize home sharing include exempting low-income landlords from income tax on income earned through renting a room in their home, ensuring additional income earned through renting a room would not affect eligibility for government assistance programs for low-income people, and ensuring caregiver move-in is exempt from just cause lease termination for lease in room in home and ADUs, among other things.

LeadingAge California is sponsoring legislation to make it easier for low-income Californians to become landlords by putting their extra rooms in home share programs.

Click here to access data regarding home-sharing programs in California, including the number of home-sharing matches they serve and the average rent collected per match.