For Qualified Income Trusts, Not All Bank Accounts Are Created Equal
Medicaid Long Term Services and Supports (MLTSS) in New Jersey pays for nursing home care for people with alzheimers disease, catastrophic disabilities and other serious difficulties with self care. The program requires any applicant with more than $2205 (three times the SSI amount–new for 2017) of gross income to make a Qualified Income Trust. Our office assists applicants with this...
Save your receipts and bills for five years, for the look-back
If medical catastrophe strikes and someone in your family needs nursing home care, they may want to apply for Medicaid to pick up those costs. The regulations are complex, but there are lots of legal strategies that we use to help a person become eligible and to protect the rest of the family at the same time. The process doesn’t stop there, though. The applicant has to prepare and file...
What if the Medicaid home care services aren’t provided? part II
Previously I blogged about the problems faced by Medicaid-eligible people living in home and community-based settings when there isn’t a sufficient provider network to provide the services needed to maintain them in their residences, or there is substantial delay in getting the services started. The issue is that the government is obligated to provide the services in the...
Medicaid applicant gets penalty period for cash transactions
Followers of this blog know that if a person applies for Medicaid to pay for nursing home care (or assisted living or home care), they have to provide five years’ of financial records and prove to the agency just what they spent every dollar on during the five year look-back period which immediately precedes the application. If the applicant can’t prove that the dollars were spent...
The system puts a heavy burden on applicant to prove Medicaid eligibility
In A.T. v. Division of Medical Assistance and Health Services (unpublished non-precedential decision, Appellate Division of Superior Court, 2015, WL 7421647), a Medicaid application was denied for failure to provide requested verifications of assets. The applicant’s grandson (DT) was her Agent under Power of Attorney (“POA”), and his father ST was the alternate Agent. The...
We Respect Our Aging Parents by Helping Them Plan for Future Needs
Could this be you? You’re in your thirties or forties, with several active children and a busy social and business life. You’ve got volunteer activities and school programs to keep track of. Your parents are in their seventies or eighties, have their own home, and appear to pay all their bills when due. You have no idea what your parents’ income or assets are because they don’t want to bother...
The application for Medicaid Home Care Services is Just the Beginning
New Jersey Medicaid has a program to deliver home and community-based services to people who meet the “institutional level of care” but would be able to remain at home as long as they receive an array of long term services and supports (LTSS). Examples of LTSS are: bathing, grocery shopping, meal preparation, feeding, dressing, safety supervision, and hands-on help with...
Medicaid applications can be full of legal difficulties
There is an impression being created out in the field that the filing of a Medicaid application is just a matter of spending down and then assembling a few years of records and submitting them to the county board of social services. The fact is that every application is intensively scrutinized. Some counties are scanning all of the financial documents to a reader program that generates a...
Get ready for a wild ride when filing a NJ Medicaid application
Growing old doesn’t mean that people stop taking care of their family members and think only about themselves. Families expand. Children may enter second marriages. The grandchildren get married. A child may run into financial trouble, lose their job or become medically disabled. Loving families support each other and that often means that people will share their home with the next...
Baby Boomers looking ahead: long term care insurance or Medicaid?
There’s no doubt about it, long-term care insurance is expensive, and the premiums can be steep if you wait until after age 70 to first buy a policy. Some companies have gotten approvals for big premium increases on old policies. The marketplace has shrunk as companies have left the business, and some companies create bureaucratic barriers to paying claims. However, there’s also no...