Three weeks before the CMS interim final rule is expected to publish. The week's news is dominated by signals about what's in the rule and what the home-care industry is doing while it waits.
CMS issues new state guidance on transformative Medicaid reforms
CMS released new state guidance this week covering a set of Medicaid reforms, including the community engagement requirements that are the focus of the upcoming interim final rule. The guidance is a partial preview of what the rule will codify, and what it says about the family caregiver exemption matters.
The most useful piece for families: the guidance instructs states to provide streamlined verification pathways for individuals who qualify for exemptions including caregiving responsibility. "Streamlined" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and how each state defines it will be the difference between an exemption that works and one that doesn't. The Family Voices analysis of the guidance is the clearest read so far.
Home-care M&A through the Deal Sheet lens
The Deal Sheet's home care M&A deep dive is the most useful single resource for tracking valuation multiples and PE trends in the home-care category in 2026. The headline pattern: PE-backed roll-ups continue to drive most of the volume, with multiples holding steady in the 8–11× EBITDA range for established operators. Earnings calls from larger operators (such as National Healthcare Properties this quarter) confirm the broader pattern of strong asset-side demand.
Trualta's training study reads a little differently a month later
We flagged Trualta's Moments That Multiply report in March. With a month of distance, the finding that ongoing training and peer connection drive better outcomes than crisis-response interventions reads as a useful policy frame: state and federal programs that fund continuous low-touch caregiver support should expect higher returns than programs that fund a single large intervention.
This connects directly to the 22% number from the AARP report — only 22% of family caregivers performing nurse-equivalent tasks have received any training. Closing that gap doesn't require new infrastructure; it requires a small commitment to deliver short, repeated training to the families already in contact with the healthcare system.
Brief notes
- Connecticut's caregiver tax credit bill has passed both chambers and now awaits Governor Lamont's signature, expected later this month.
- Several home-health trade publications are previewing what the CMS rule will mean for agency staffing.
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