How I Can Help Your Mother (or Father)

How an Elder Law Attorney or Medicaid Planning Lawyer Can Help your Mother (or Father)...

...or grandmother or grandfather... 

Statistically, most older adults will eventually require help with normal activities of daily living. It might start with requiring a home-health aide, this may eventually transition into an assisted-living facility residential arrangement, and when skilled care is needed around the clock, a skilled-nursing home will become a necessity.  Most people don’t realize that Medicare only pays a portion of long-term care bills for 100 days. That is a lifetime benefit. So, after Medicare has paid their 100 days, Medicare is useless for long-term care purposes. 

There are then three options available to pay for long-term care:

(1)   Utilize long-term care insurance: Most people do not have LTC insurance. Even when they do - the benefit is often limited to $150 a day.

(2)   Cash: unfortunately, most people realize that they have to come out of pocket. Long term care costs run from about$3,000 a month for hiring a home health aide (8 hours a day, 5 days a week) to$8,500 a month for a high-end nursing home. So we can expect to pay between $36,000 and $102,000 per year for long-term care. That will decimate the life savings of most Floridians. Quite frankly, the burden often then falls on the senior citizen's adult children. This brings me to the third option, which is:

(3)   Medicaid: Most people think of this as “health insurance for the impoverished.” But Medicaid covers and refers to multiple programs. One of these is referred to as the Medicaid institutional care program (ICP). Medicaid ICP will pay almost the entire nursing home bill, a huge portion of an assisted-living facility bill (in an ALF that accepts Medicaid)and for home-health care.

Most people do not automatically qualify for Medicaid. Instead of being forced into poverty, our Medicaid-planning strategies can be used to ethically and legally qualify our clients for the Medicaid ICP program.

Medicaid Pre-Planning

For those that do not immediately need long-term care, we can utilize an even greater number of options to do medicaid pre-planning. As your medicaid planning attorney, I will put the turnkey mechanisms in place to almost immediately qualify your mother or father for Medicaid when it is needed in the future. We also plan for incapacity - this can happen over time or after one serious medical episode. We plan for our clients to retain control over their assets until they are incapable of doing so. With our pre-planning services, our client will have already chosen the person or people who can act on their behalf when they become incapacitated (rather than having to go through the process of allowing the government or judge say who is in charge).

Medicaid Crisis Planning

For those that need immediate long-term care (those just starting their 100 day Medicare window) need to act fast. Our medicaid planning options a bit more constrained, but still result in our clients saving tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars.

Medicaid planning allows mom and dad to protect the assets they have for retirement so they can utilize them to increase their quality of life and have something left to pass down to their heirs.