When someone usually begins thinking about the cost of a nursing home or skilled nursing facility.
Atty. Tom Olsen: Robert, tell our listeners what your typical client is.
Atty. Robert Hidock: My typical client is usually a widow or widower that's in a rehab facility, and they're going into a skilled nursing. That's my typical client, and they usually have maybe a house, a car, a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and they're faced with this decision, what are we going to do? Because skilled nursing is incredibly expensive. It's $10,000 to $12,000 a month, roughly $300 to $400 a day, and if they were to private pay, that money is gone in a year and a half, two years, and then they're going to be forced to go on Medicaid anyway if their children aren't going to pay for them.
My goal then is to protect the assets. We would do a personal services contract which bypasses that Medicaid five-year look-back period, Tom, and it is designed to actually go in with the Medicaid application. I draft the personal services contract where mom can't give money away normally but for the contract, she's giving, and in return, she's getting care so that makes it okay to bypass that five-year look-back period. Once the contract is done, all her kids would have to do is just simply transfer funds into their account that goes in with the Medicaid application, and clients are protected.
Tom: You're referring to it as a skilled nursing facility, also known as a nursing home, which I think most people know it by. What we're talking about is that an elderly person falls and breaks their hip, we know that, first of all, everybody who's over 65 is entitled to Medicare. If you fall and you break your hip, and you need to go into rehab, Medicare is going to pay for that rehab, I think generally up to 30 days or so.
Robert: They will, and then they'll pay up to 80% for a couple of more days.
Tom: Hopefully, when you fall and break your hip, and you go to rehab, hopefully, everything's great and wonderful, and you get to go back home. That's what everybody wants to, but often we find that when somebody falls and breaks their hip, they're not going to be able to go back home. They're going to have to go into a skilled nursing facility.
Robert: Yes. It really depends on how fragile they are when they fall. That's the one thing that we never actually know is how much care someone's going to need from a medical event. I just like to comfort our clients knowing no matter what happens we can take care of them. If it's skilled nursing, we have the tools that will get them into skilled nursing. If they're looking at home health care, we've got Medicaid's long-term care waiver that can keep their parents at home longer, so we have the best of both worlds.
Tom: Robert, we in fact have a booklet, and it's called How to Protect Your Life Savings from Nursing Homes, and if people want to get that free booklet, all they have to do is to call the Olsen Law Group in Orlando at 407-423-5561. Or go to our website, olsenlawgroup.com, and right there on our home page, you're going to find the big red button. It's called Free Booklets. There's a whole list of them. You can check which booklet you want, and when we mail you those free booklets by the way they come now with two free sweet treats, one to keep and one to share.
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