Planning for Medicaid & A Longer Life

Medicaid is complex and confusing. It wouldn’t be your fault if you felt like it was made this complicated on purpose to discourage people from trying to qualify. Lots of people feel this way. To make it worse, medicaid is mistaken for medicare very often. The basic difference is medicaid is for the poor and medicare is for the elderly.

Practically all senior citizens can receive medicare if they’ve paid their taxes during their working years. Though for seniors who do not qualify, they can buy their way in by paying set premiums to the federal government. After reviewing the benefits and you feel that it’s a bit lacking, you can buy supplemental medicare insurance to cover the holes medicare leaves behind.

Back to medicaid. This is a joint program handled by the state and the government to make sure that the poor have access to medical services. Medicaid is regulated by congress and state legislatures. The laws in place have dictated the standards for permanent residents only to qualify medicaid. They do not cover illegal aliens. The standards differ depending on your state but this, along with other concepts, applies everywhere.

Medicaid focused health-care lawyers focus on these programs to provide services to the elderly. Medicaid make sure you are provided a nursing home or receive at home care, which not many people know about. At-home care can be much more beneficial but differs with each state.  

The most commonly known program is ‘chronic care medicaid’. This is when a person reaches a physical or mental state which means they are incapable of activities of daily living or ADL. They are deemed unsafe to live in their home unassisted and require medical assistance.

Please note that Medicare does not cover payment for nursing home care. It pays for skilled nursing care within nursing homes and similar facilities only. This is one of those holes that supplemental medicare insurance can cover for a set period of time.

Seniors that need permanent nursing home solutions have 3 options:

1. Pay for it on their own

2. Obtain long term care insurance

3. Try to qualify for medicaid

If your assets are limited, you will need to focus on that last option. Qualifying for long term medicaid will depend on whether you planned for medicaid in advance or if your current financial state automatically qualifies you for medicaid. In some cases, individuals have worked around lowering their assets in order to qualify while still insuring that these assets are protected or used in a beneficial way.

If you are interested in learning more about that, find a medicaid planning lawyer to help you. There are many ways you can improve your situation more swiftly than you thought and having a lawyer with practical experience and knows their way around medicaid laws in your state can really make things much better for your health and your finances.  You may have more options than you thought with different ways to plan for your future. Call up a medicaid planning lawyer today and discuss your situation for practical legal advice.