This chapter helps the reader to understand the history of housing and long-term care for older adults and people with disabilities and specific components of the Long-Term Care Reconciliation Act. The chapter discusses how legislation related to housing and long-term care provides resources to older adults and people with disabilities. It explains community-based care options such as home health, seniors congregate living, assisted living options, skilled nursing facilities, and long-term care facilities. Although differences may exist from state to state relative to who qualifies for these options and when they qualify, these will be discussed in some detail specifically providing an overview of these as options for care management of older adults. The chapter describes different residential models of care for people as they require community-based settings or settings with supports and examines issues that will face the long-term and community-based care settings in the future.

This chapter focuses on sources of evidence for evidence-based policy development. It explores some of the dilemmas with developing an evidence base and provides a range of empirical sources within the aging and disabilities arenas that can be used in building an evidence-based approach to policy development. The journey, however, will not be without struggle—since philosophical paradigms, and social and economic factors will interface and play a role in the development of evidence-based policy. The chapter helps the reader to be aware of healthy people 2020 benchmarks that are used to guide program planning and policy development. Benchmarks currently have been established in order to identify where health goals for the nation and individual states should be, and the program is evaluated routinely by local and state health departments. Healthy people 2020 is also used to gauge the impact of health policy.

This chapter explores health promotion frameworks, to showcase their role vis-à-vis health policy and programs, and discusses three specific frameworks. Health promotion frameworks are theoretical conceptions of how health behavior can be addressed. These frameworks are conceives for the purpose of program and policy development. The health promotion frameworks are the health belief model (HBM), the theory of reasoned action, the transtheoretical model of stages of change. This chapter addresses these three questions; however, prior to discussing these questions and answers, it is essential to understand some well-known health promotion frameworks. Although a number of health promotion frameworks exist in the literature. It focuses on three that can be specifically applied to older adults. The chapter showcases use of health promotion frameworks in the program planning process for older adults can have a number of positive outcomes.