Nursing home crisis planning vs preplanning. Protecting your money from the cost of a nursing home.

Attorney Tom Olsen: Sometimes people will call us and say, "Tom or Robert, my mom is in rehab and she's not going to be able to go home. She's going to have to go straight to a nursing home. She's going to be there in 7 or 10 days. Can you help us in that short period of time?" Can we?

Attorney Robert Hidock: The answer is yes. We're very fortunate. We've got a great Medicaid team. I think we have one of the best in Central Florida, if not the State. Of course, we all have our workload, but when we have a crisis situation that goes to the front of the list and I can get any document done to protect the money, Medicaid applications can get in at the last day of the month. That's why in the Medicaid world, the end of the month is always the busiest.

If you've ever seen Medicaid's policy, Tom, they're books like 2,000 pages, but there's one line in it that makes the whole policy worthwhile. If you're eligible for Medicaid one day of the month, you're eligible for Medicaid every day of the month. If somebody's worried that they're having to private pay for a month, but we can get them eligible the last day of the month, goes all the way back to the beginning.

Tom: We call that crisis planning and it's just a fact of life, that that's something we have to do often for our clients. We understand, we're prepared to do that for them. We have another Medicaid planning, we call it pre-planning, and for that, we call it a Medicaid assessment and tell the listeners about that.

Robert: When we talk about pre-planning, it always starts with education. We would love for people to come to our workshops. Part of pre-planning is also a Ladybird deed, as Tom always talks about, of helping to avoid probate, but it also helps recovery from Medicaid. A crucial part is then the financial power of attorney, have to have one that is up-to-date and current, and then the last part is a Medicaid assessment.

I'm not sure of another law firm that does it. Our clients will fill out an information sheet and then I will draft a letter, if you will, that's about 8 or 10 pages long, and I will go through all of their income. I'm going to tell them if they're over the income limit each month, for Medicaid, and what that remedy is, I'm going to go through every asset. I'm going to tell them if it's accountable or not accountable, and I'm going to tell them how I'm going to protect it.

It becomes a blueprint for them to follow if a crisis happens. We don't want someone scrambling at that last minute, if not possible. If it's a husband and a wife and the husband had a stroke, we don't want the wife worrying, "Oh my God. I'm going to lose my life savings." We want her to be concerned about her husband, getting him the right medical help, then we have the plan for him.

Tom: Robert, we know it's a constant that the parents want to pass on as much as their wealth as they can to their children, without it being all eaten up by a nursing home. That's our starting point, and the beauty of this Medicaid assessment is that it is customized to the client, whether they're a single person or a married couple, takes into consideration all the different kinds of assets they have, then you create this blueprint for them about what would happen if one of them, or both of them, go into a nursing home.

Then they can tell their kids, "Kids, here's a blueprint. Here's what you need to know, if one or both of us need to go into a nursing home, all the tools that you need are put in place to protect our wealth from nursing homes."

Robert: Exactly. It's customizable to them, but it also tries to replicate their estate plan. It comes in a nice binder and it actually is very similar to your binder. In theory, if they're an Olson Law Group customer, they're going to have their estate planning binder and they're going to have their Medicaid planning binder, all together.

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