If you’re lucky, you, your spouse or other family loved ones will never need to spend much if any extended time in a longer-term care facility.
Those come in varied configurations in New York and nationally. In today’s Pope Law Firm blog post, we’re primarily talking nursing homes.
Virtually any discussion of those facilities converges quickly on a unified bottom line, namely this: They are expensive.
In fact, the financial exactions linked with a nursing home stay can easily eat up most – sometimes all – of the resources a family has carefully set aside over many years to provide for the future.
Unfortunately, scarcely few Americans have a degree of wealth sufficient to personally defray all the costs linked with nursing home residency. We know that none of our readers harbors a view that care expenditures are not immediately sobering concerns.
Moreover, we duly note on our firm’s website that, “Few seniors have health insurance coverage that covers the cost of a nursing home or other long-term care facility.”
That can make for a challenging reality, but it doesn’t close off options for the millions of people who are still able to rely upon Medicare and some level of personal assets to pay for professional care.
Medicare rules and processes routinely seem a bit cumbersome and complex to legions of individuals scrutinizing them. There are asset-limitation requirements, as well as a so-called “look back” period concerning gifting and the transfer of wealth that must be accounted for.
Experienced attorneys well versed in elder law matters routinely help valued clients make sense of the particulars and craft tailored strategies that optimally serve to protect savings and ensure necessary care.
Nursing home care planning is important. Having a proven legal ally on board to assist with the process can help ensure a desired result.