Colorado Medicaid Long-Term Care

Health First Colorado is the state's Medicaid program, run by the Department of Health Care Policy & Financing — universally known as HCPF. HCPF groups nursing-facility care, home-and-community services, and disability supports under one umbrella it calls Long-Term Services and Supports, or LTSS. Families often see all four labels — Medicaid, Health First Colorado, LTSS, HCBS — attached to the same underlying case, which can make the paperwork feel more fragmented than the system actually is.

Within LTSS, Colorado offers nursing-facility services, HCBS waivers, and the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE). HCPF's income-trust instructions specifically name institutional care, HCBS, and PACE as the three long-term-care settings its income-trust framework can support for establishing and keeping income eligibility. The care setting determines the service route, but a financial review can still be required no matter which of the three a person ends up in.