Do Not Miss Out on All of the Medicaid Exemptions You are Entitled To

Medicaid rules can be confusing and even Department of Social Services caseworkers get their own rules wrong from time to time. Having an advocate that can work through the maze of rules can pay off for the family.

In North Carolina, a Medicaid applicant can have up to a $10,000 face amount life insurance policy that will be exempt from Medicaid spend down. We recently had a client whose mother had a $5000 face amount life insurance policy which should not count for Medicaid eligibility purposes. However, because with paid-up additions from dividends off of this policy the policy had grown to where the total death benefit was over $19,000 and the cash value was over $17,000. When the client applied for Medicaid they were initially told by the caseworker that the dividends which were paying for paid-up additions would have to be liquidated to bring the policy under $10,000 in death benefit. Because they had hired us to represent them in the Medicaid application, we were able to point out to the Department of Social Services caseworker that this policy remained exempt. It took the caseworker some time to research this issue and run it past her supervisors before she was able to confirm that the policy would remain exempt. We are happy that she was able to come up with the right answer but our concern is that if this family had not had an experienced advocate that this policy would have been drained and the family would have ended up with thousands of dollars less. This is an example of how knowledgeable advocacy by an elder law attorney can actually save the family money. This one transaction saved the family three times what the legal fees were for this case.

We have been able to protect much more property than just a small life insurance policy for our clients when long-term care created the need for Medicaid eligibility. With proper planning, we have saved valuable parcels of real estate for families that had owned the real estate for decades. Without our assistance, this real property would have needed to be used to pay for long-term care and the assets that the senior generation had worked their entire adult lives to accumulate would have been lost.

Good long-term care Medicaid planning is not inexpensive. However, it is far less expensive than not doing planning at all or doing incorrect planning. One of my partner’s client that I worked with told her that our planning actually saved her family around $250,000. It makes me feel good when I am able to help a family to preserve assets that they have worked a lifetime to accumulate.

We also have families who have benefited from long-term care insurance. We have several families who have had policies with no limit on the number of years that the policy would cover. Those families that had these premier policies never had to apply for Medicaid benefits. They were able to pick the place they wanted to receive care without regard to whether that facility or that type of care was covered by a public needs tested benefit program. We wish all of our families had these kinds of policies. Unfortunately, many families were not able to afford such policies or could not obtain them due to medical conditions or age by the time they looked at them. Some of those policies are no longer available but there are still very good long-term care insurance contracts to be considered. With a robust five-year or longer long-term care contract we can often give our client families the luxury of knowing that they could have five years of coverage in any setting and during that time period, we could arrange their financial affairs with good legal planning so that we could eventually access public benefits such as Medicaid or Veterans’ benefits once the long-term care insurance runs out.

Contact Strauss Attorneys PLLC in Asheville at 828 – 258 – 0994 or in our Hendersonville office at 828 – 696 – 1811 to make an appointment to discuss how we can help protect your family’s assets from the incredible costs of long-term care. You will be glad that you did. You can learn more about our firm at www.strausslaw.com.