Medicaid planning refers to arranging or transferring your assets to prevent or to minimize their use by Medicaid if it pays for your long-term care. This article explains how you can shelter some of your assets with an annuity while you or your spouse has Medicaid pay for your long term care costs.
Medicaid will pay for nursing home costs; but it does so only for those who are impoverished. Since Medicaid is a combined state and federal program, each state defines how little your assets must be before Medicaid will pickup your nursing home costs. Typical asset threshold levels are about $2,000 to $3,000. Find out more info here about Medicaid planning.
When you apply for Medicaid help, it ‘counts’ your assets to determine if you qualify for free assistance. If you have too many, it’ll charge you annual costs appropriate to your state that you must pay from your assets until you’ve spent down your money to your state’s threshold asset level.
You can’t simply transfer your assets to someone else to impoverish yourself before applying for Medicaid. Medicaid will attribute whatever you transferred as a countable asset -unless you transferred it some 5 years – called the look-back period – before applying for help.