Medicaid Planning

To qualify for Medicaid coverage of long-term care, you must satisfy very complicated financial eligibility rules—rules that often can be traps for the unwary. One of the most significant traps [...]

For many Medicaid applicants, individual retirement accounts (IRAs) are one of their biggest assets. If you do not plan properly, IRAs can count as an available asset and affect Medicaid [...]

Long-term care involves not only a loss of personal autonomy; it also comes at a tremendous financial price. Proper planning can help your family prepare for the financial toll and protect assets [...]

As we discussed last month, irrevocable trusts are legal documents that you cannot remove assets from and whose terms you cannot change the trust is established. These are most often created for [...]

Parents and other family members who want to pass on assets during their lifetimes may be tempted to gift the assets.  Although setting up an irrevocable trust lacks the simplicity of giving a [...]

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will now give states the option to obtain a portion of their federal Medicaid funding via so-called “block grants.” This potentially [...]

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has released the 2020 federal guidelines for how much money the spouses of institutionalized Medicaid recipients may keep, as well as [...]

When it comes to long-term care costs, the charges for home care are now rising faster than those for nursing home care, according to Genworth’s 2019 Cost of Care survey. In the past year, [...]

Federal law requires the state to attempt to recover the long-term care benefits from a Medicaid recipient’s estate after the recipient’s death. If steps aren’t taken to protect [...]

After a Medicaid recipient dies, the state must attempt to recoup from his or her estate whatever benefits it paid for the recipient’s care. This is called “estate recovery.” [...]