What is spousal refusal in nursing home planning?

Speaker 1: Robert you touched on spousal refusal, one of those tools, but tell our listeners about spousal refusal.

Attorney Robert Hidock: What a spousal refusal is, is when you're married, a married couple, and one of you is applying for Medicaid and let's say they're going into a skilled nursing facility. As a married couple they are allowed to have $150,620 in countable assets, not their house, not their IRA, but if they well over that number what we do is the spouse that's home, Medicaid will call them the community spouse, all the assets go to the community spouse's name because Florida allows for interest spousal transfers. Once that's been aligned accordingly, the community spouse will write a letter for her basically saying, "I love my husband, but I'm refusing to make my assets available for his care."

Then the person in the nursing home, usually via the power of the attorney, assigns the right to recover his assets from the State of Florida, State of Florida has the policy that it will not recover from a spouse. Client goes on Medicaid, spouse at home gets to retain all assets and even if she does the spousal refusal, she is still entailed to an income distribution from the spouse that's going into the nursing home.

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