A Hartford Medicaid attorney helps you to make sure you can qualify for Medicaid benefits when you need coverage. Many seniors come to rely on Medicaid to pay for costly medical care as they age, and to pay for the costs of nursing home care. However, you can qualify for Medicaid only if you have minimal income and limited resources. If you want to try to preserve some assets that you own, you need to make a plan in advance to protect your property and still get Medicaid benefits. 
It is best to make your Medicaid plan as early as possible, so you should talk with a Hartford Medicaid attorney when you are still relatively young and don’t yet need nursing home care.
Nirenstein, Horowitz & Associates can help you to determine if you need to make a Medicaid plan. If making such a plan makes sense for your situation, we’ll take care of the technical details for you. Give us a call today to learn more.
When Should You Get Help from a Hartford Medicaid Attorney?
Medicaid coverage can be more comprehensive in some ways than Medicare coverage or private insurance coverage. Getting access to Medicaid can become very important if you need custodial or routine care in a nursing home, because Medicare and most private insurers will not pay for this kind of care.
The chances of needing nursing home care increase as you get older. However, anyone could end up needing to go into a nursing home if they suffer an illness or an injury at any age which leaves them unable to live independently and care for themselves. If the time comes when you need nursing home care and you have not made plans in advance with help from a Hartford Medicaid attorney, you might not quality for Medicaid coverage because your financial resources are too high.
In this situation, you would have to spend your money and possibly sell some of your assets so the proceeds from the sale could be used for the payment of your nursing home bills. Only after spending your money and reducing the valuable of your countable resources below Medicaid’s eligibility limits would you become eligible for Medicaid.
If you want to avoid this forced spend down of assets, you should talk with a Hartford Medicaid attorney when you are still relatively young and when you are unlikely to imminently need nursing home care. You can make your Medicaid plan well in advance to protect the maximum value of assets and to ensure you can qualify for Medicaid coverage right away when nursing home care is needed. If you have assets you don’t want to spend on a nursing home, now is the time to talk with an attorney to find out how to protect them.
Why it is Important to Get Help from a Hartford Medicaid Attorney When You’re Young?
Talking with a Medicaid attorney early is important because when you need nursing care, you can’t just give away your assets and then expect Medicaid to pay your bills. Medicaid will look back over a period of five years from the time you apply to receive benefits. The purpose is to find transferred assets.
If you transferred assets in that five year period, you are going to be disqualified temporarily from Medicaid eligibility. There is an equation used to determine the number of months of disqualification. You have to divide the value of transferred assets by the average nursing home cost in your area. For example, if you transferred $5,000 in assets and the average monthly cost of the nursing homes in your area was $5,000, you’d be disqualified for a month.
If you have made your Medicaid plan more than five years before you need nursing home care, there will be no period of disqualification. This will mean you won’t have to spend your own money for months while you wait for Medicaid to kick in.
Contact a Hartford Medicaid Attorney Today
A Hartford Medicaid attorney at Nirenstein, Horowitz & Associates will assist you in determining when Medicaid planning is important and will help you to decide if now is the right time to create your Medicaid plan. We will also assist you in actually moving forward with the Medicaid planning process, ensuring you use the right legal tools and processes to get protection for your assets.
To find out more about how Medicaid planning fits in with your comprehensive estate planning process, you can download a free estate planning worksheet. When you are ready to get started on the creation of your personalized Medicaid plan, you can give us a call at 860-548-1000 or contact us online.
To learn more, please download our free is there a medicaid asset in Connecticut here
Mr. Nirenstein is licensed to practice before the courts of the State of Connecticut and the United States District Court. He is a member of the Connecticut and Hartford County Bar Associations, and the Estate and Probate, Elder Law, Business Law and Real Estate Sections of the Connecticut Bar Association.
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