Because November is Long-term Care Awareness Month, for the past few weeks we’ve been talking about Medicaid planning. Those of us who work with Medicaid planning and elder care services know what Medicaid planning can and cannot do for a person, but do you?

The purpose of Medicaid planning is to preserve your assets and set up your affairs in such a way that “the State” will pay the majority of the nursing home care costs, if or when the time comes. With good Medicaid planning, you should need only to contribute your income toward nursing home care costs. With Medicaid planning, you should not need to sell assets in order to pay for your long term care. If you have a spouse, with Medicaid planning you may be able to preserve income for your spouse rather than paying it to the nursing home in certain circumstances.

Long-term Care (LTC) broadly refers to medical and social services designed to support the needs of people living with chronic health problems that affect their ability to perform everyday activities. Long-term care services include traditional medical services, social services, and housing. Odds are, the majority of people over the age of 65 will need LTC at some point, but most people don’t plan for it. Sure, people think about and plan for retirement, but rarely are LTC costs factored into such a plan.  If you require nursing home care, in our experience, your costs could be as much as $84,000.00 or more a year. For one person in western Kansas—that can be quite the unexpected expense.
 
What are some ways you can pay for LTC should nursing home care be required?

Sometimes our best laid plans simply don’t work. We typically don’t plan on illness, being in an accident, or early on-set Alzheimer’s. When life doesn’t happen like we plan, we need to be able to talk to someone well-versed in long-term care planning who can help develop a new plan that accomplishes our goals.  

Long-term care crisis planning can mean many things, but ultimately it is based on the notion that a major, unplanned life event occurred, and you need to figure out how to move forward with care and address the costs of such care.  

Here are a few of the ways we can help you: