Hi, I am Gerald Eidelman, the founding attorney of the Eidelman Law Firm, and I’m here to talk to you about Medicaid spend down and what it means.
In general, when a person goes to a nursing home, they tend to take advantage of Medicaid to pay for their long-term care. The problem is that Medicaid is a program that requires both medical necessity and financial necessity. Medical necessity is obviously proven by the fact that you need to be in a long-term care facility. Financial necessity requires going through your finances, looking at your assets, and determining if you meet the criteria to receive financial aid from Medicaid.
Part of what you’re trying to do when you apply for Medicaid is try to spend down some of your money. So, for example, if you have a home and your well spouse wants to stay in the home, the home would be exempt as well as any money you spent on repairing the home and updating the home. Maybe this the well spouse could use a new car, so that’s another way to spend down the money. So when we talk about spend down, we talk about using the money to buy items, property that will be exempt from being counted and therefore lowering your total asset pool so that you can qualify for Medicaid. Other estate planning techniques you can use in order to lower your estate, so that you can qualify for Medicaid more quickly include setting up an Irrevocable Trust ahead of time. It includes setting up a Qualified Medicaid Annuity, as well as setting up inter-family loans and caretaker agreements.
That’s all the time we have. I am Gerald Eidelman. We’ll see you next time.
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