SRB LLC

Senior Resources & Benefits, LLC

Experts Specializing in Medicaid, Medicare, VA & Social Security Benefits

as well as estate and asset protection planning

When Craig Riffel began practicing law over 30 years, he noticed a troubling practice in the legal profession. Attorneys spend thousands of hours and people spend millions of dollars on traditional estate planning each year.

All this time and money is focused on protecting clients, their families and their assets from the time and expense encountered with probate, estate administration, estate taxes and other issues. They discuss using a will versus a trust to perform estate planning. In some cases, they even discuss very specific issues such as estate taxes, types of trusts or other particular issues clients may be facing.

However, after all the time and money spent on traditional estate planning, attorneys and their clients completely ignore the largest threat to clients, their families and their assets. This threat is long-term care. Although addressing traditional estate planning issues are very important, they pertain to administering and disposing of assets after clients’ deaths. What happens between the time clients perform their traditional estate planning and the time they die if long-term care is needed?

Long-term care encompasses care at home as well as in a nursing facility. According to the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, on average one out of every two people (50%) requires some type of long-term care during their lifetime.

The cost of long-term care is very expensive including such things as in-home care, nursing facility care, medical services and medications. The cheapest long-term care is semi-private room care in a nursing facility which is currently $8,000 to $10,000 per month in rural areas of the Midwest. This cost does not include medical services or medications, and is exponentially higher for care in the home. Furthermore, individuals with Alzheimer’s or dementia-related illnesses need care often extending 11 years on average, while non-dementia patients typically require care for over 3 years on average.

Although traditional estate planning is very important, Craig questioned whether attorneys, including himself, were adequately representing their clients by not addressing long-term care. It seems foolish for an attorney to ignore the largest threat (long-term care) to clients, their families and their assets while focusing on much smaller issues. It also seemed foolish to focus on issues under traditional estate planning which occur at someone’s death while not protecting the assets during the person’s lifetime. If the assets are not adequately protected during the person’s lifetime, there will not be any assets left to administer when the person dies.

Craig discovered there to be four ways to pay for long-term care. They are: (1) self-paying by using assets, (2) purchasing long-term care insurance, (3) qualifying for Medicaid benefits and (4) qualifying for veteran’s benefits if the person is a veteran. Although self-paying by using assets is always an alternative, the cost of care usually leads to a severe dissipation of assets.

Long-term care insurance tends to be both medically elusive and cost prohibitive. Many people cannot medically qualify for long-term care insurance. For the ones who can, they cannot afford it. SRB does NOT sell any products, including long-term care insurance.

For those people who are veterans, there are veterans’ benefits to help pay for long-term care at home, in an assisted living facility and in a nursing home. The benefits are not service connected meaning the veteran did not have to incur his or her disability during active duty. Additionally, the veteran did not have to serve in a theater of war. In fact, these veteran’s benefits are also available to the veteran’s surviving spouse who may be disabled.

Lastly, Craig discovered most people do not understand Medicaid or how it works. Very few people understand:

(a) Working people pay for Medicaid through their FICA or SECA taxes. Therefore, every person who has worked has paid for his or her Medicaid benefits.
(b) Individuals can own significant amounts of assets and qualify for Medicaid benefits. The $2,000 limit of which most people have heard only applies to “countable resources” and not assets generally. People with assets totaling well over $5 million have qualified for Medicaid with SRB.
(c) Although it is best to do Medicaid planning as early as possible, people can do Medicaid planning within five years of filing a Medicaid application. The 5-year look-back rule only requires an applicant to disclose transactions although those transactions may qualify for one of the 26 exception thereby not impacting the person’s Medicaid eligibility.

During the past 30 years, Craig has helped countless clients access the Medicaid benefits for which they have paid in order to pay for long-term care, thereby protecting themselves, their families and their assets.