Medicaid Qualification

As an elder care attorney, a phrase I hear from time-to-time is that an annuity is “Medicaid friendly.”  

Certain types of trust may be used by seniors who want to protect their savings and other assets from creditors and long-term care costs.  These trusts are referred to as “income-only trusts” or “Medicaid Asset Protection Trusts.  

Individuals I consult with as part of my elder care practice frequently wonder when they should submit the Medicaid application for a patient in a nursing home?  The patient they are consulting about is usually their elderly parent or their spouse.

In my last post, I wrote about how individuals can irrevocably assign the death benefit of life insurance policies in order to obtain a funeral plan.

Some elders who need to qualify for Medicaid nursing home benefits in Michigan do not have life insurance, but may have savings that would disqualify them from Medicaid.  

As an elder care attorney practicing in the Detroit area, my clients come to me with a variety of legal needs based on their own unique situations.  However, there are also some needs that are common to many of our clients, including how to pay for long-term care, reimburse a child who has provided care to their parent before the parent moved to a nursing home, and how to protect the financial security of the spouse living in the community when their spouse becomes a nursing home resident.  

In my last post, I discussed the patient pay amount, which is a special type of co-pay for nursing home residents who are eligible for Medicaid nursing home benefits in Michigan.  

As an elder care attorney, a common question I am asked is “will the nursing home take my mother’s Social Security?” When a parent or another older loved one moves to a nursing home, there tends to be a lot going on, so people are unsure of how the billing works and what happens to the nursing home resident’s income.

In my last blog, I wrote about one of the protections contained in Michigan’s Medicaid rules for married couples:  the ability to seek an order in probate court increasing the protected spousal amount. 

As noted in my last post about the Michigan Medicaid Assets Declaration form, the spouse of a nursing home resident (called the community spouse) can keep all of the couple’s countable assets if they do not exceed $22,728. If the couple’s countable assets exceed $22,729, the community spouse can keep an amount equal to half of the countable assets, but no more than $113,640, without further action.

As an elder care attorney with a law office in the Rochester Hills area, I get asked a lot of questions about the Medicaid application process for patients in Michigan nursing homes.  The “Assets Declaration” form is a common source of questions, so I thought I would write about the purpose of this form.

Betty was concerned and unsure about what to do next. Betty’s husband Ted, age 81, suffered his third stroke within the last two years and then he was hospitalized for a week. Ted was discharged to a nursing home for skilled rehab, but due to the effects of the stroke along with his dementia, he did not participate in rehab.