The first week of March is dominated by an industry move that signals where caregiving dollars are flowing, the slow build toward AARP's Valuing the Invaluable update later this month, and a notable new entrant in family-care technology.
Papa launches "Papa Plus," reframes companion care as a clinical channel
Miami-based Papa announced Papa Plus on March 4, an evolution of its companion-visit model. The company's "Pals" will now help members get to annual wellness visits, navigate telehealth, and reduce post-hospital readmission risk. The framing matters: companion care, historically positioned as a soft benefit, is being repositioned as a measurable clinical input that health plans will pay for. Papa now reports roughly 1,030 employees and $301M raised to date.
The shift is part of a larger pattern across the industry. As we'll explore in the monthly long-form, operational care is consolidating — Honor's combined entity with Home Instead is now a $2.1B home-care services business — while family coordination is fragmenting into a different set of tools.
The OBBBA implementation conversation gets sharper
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act's Medicaid work requirements have been law since last summer, but the implementation specifics are still being worked out. AARP estimates 7.3 million family caregivers ages 18 to 64 were on Medicaid in 2025. The law exempts caregivers of children 13 and under and disabled adults, but the exemption only matters if states write their renewal forms in ways that make it easy to claim.
Brookings published an analysis this week arguing the bill's longer-term effect on the care economy will compound through both Medicaid and the workforce. States have until January 1, 2027, to adopt the new 80-hours-per-month rule.
The Fitbit co-founders enter family caregiving
Axios reported on February 3 that the co-founders of Fitbit have launched Luffu, a self-funded company building an "intelligent family care system." The product is starting in software and expanding to hardware. The credibility of the founding team makes this the most significant new entrant in the family-care space in some time. Worth tracking how the product takes shape.
Caregiving in the US 2025 — still the most-cited dataset of the year
The National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP's Caregiving in the US 2025 report, released in February, continues to drive the conversation. The headline finding — 63 million Americans now serving as unpaid family caregivers, a nearly 50% jump since 2015 — is the demographic context against which every policy and industry story this year should be read.
The Caregiving Newsroom is published weekly on Monday morning. If a story below should have been on this list, or one shouldn't have been, reply to this post by email — we read everything.