GOING INTO A NURSING HOME DOESN’T HAVE TO MEAN GOING BROKE

If you have a spouse, parent or their loved one in a nursing home, or if you are facing a decision on nursing home placement, you are painfully aware of how expensive nursing home care is.  Nursing home costs in the St. Louis area now average over $3,500 per month.  The cost keeps going up.  When prescription costs are added in, many families pay $5,000 or more per month to care for a loved one in a nursing home.

We call it “going broke a month at a time.” 

And that is exactly what happens to many people in nursing homes.  They start out paying their own way, and eventually run out of money.  Then, and only then, do they apply for Medicaid.  It happens that way because most people think that it has to happen that way.  They have been told – perhaps by friends, perhaps by the nursing home social worker, maybe even by a lawyer – that in order to qualify for Medicaid to pay for the cost of nursing home care, they must first spend themselves down to almost nothing.  In the case of a married couple, they have been told that the spouse who is not in the nursing home can keep some assets, but that amount hardly seems enough to provide any sense of future financial security for that spouse.

We have good news!  It doesn’t have to be that way for your family!

At The Coulson Law Group, we apply our legal talents and our thorough working knowledge of the Medicaid eligibility rules and regulations to help our clients achieve a much better result.  With the skilled planning help we can provide, it is often possible to save much – and in some cases all – of a nursing home resident’s or applicant’s assets from having to be spent down to pay for nursing home costs before becoming eligible for Medicaid.  For a married couple, it is often possible to qualify the nursing home resident or applicant spouse immediately for Medicaid, protecting all of the couple’s assets from having to be spent down to pay for nursing home care.

The Medicaid eligibility rules permit the opportunity to protect assets through wise planning.  The planning measures range from simple things like prepaying for a funeral and burial to more sophisticated initiatives like Medicaid-qualified annuities and the purchase of a life estate interest in real estate.

Not all of the potential planning measures will work for everyone.  The laws in Illinois are, in many respects, very different from those in Missouri.  Some planning measures will produce a good result if carried out in one way, but cause ineligibility if done in a slightly different way.

Planning done by “amateurs” can often do much more harm than good.  We do planning that works!  We produce highly individualized plans based on each client’s asset and income structure.  Working closely with our clients, we guide them in carrying out the planning measures.  And we handle for our clients what many people who have gone through the process consider a nerve-wracking and difficult experience: the filing and processing of the Medicaid application.