Medicaid Nursing Homes

My dad’s health has been failing these past few years. Since I work all day I do not have the time to care for him. I do not want to leave him at home all by himself because he could injure himself. So I decided the best thing to do was to send him to a nursing home. The only problem with this was that I do not have the money to pay for his nursing home. I thought all hope was lost in putting my dad in the nursing home but as I did more research on this, I found that Medicaid would pay his nursing home needs. This excited me because my dad did have Medicaid but I did not know that it would pay the entire cost of him living in a nursing home.

Since my dad already has Medicaid it was easy for him to get into Medicaid nursing homes. For those people that do not have Medicaid yet, you would have to apply for it. To qualify for Medicaid, you would have to meet the requirements of an income and assets test. They will check your income which would include payments from social security and pension payments. For assets, they will check the big ticket items that you own such as your car, house, and bank account. If the amount goes over the limits set by Medicaid, then you have to use up all your money first before Medicaid would pay for the cost of the nursing home. Also, you would not be able to get Medicaid by giving away all of your assets to family members. Medicaid would check your history for the past few years.

Luckily while researching all this stuff for my dad I had learned a lot. My dad has a friend that needed to move into a nursing home too. However, he was not on Medicaid like my dad was. He actually had to apply for Medicaid first. I told him all the information that I had gathered and he was able to get accepted for Medicaid.

Medicare Assisted Living Facilities

If you are on Medicare and you are a senior, you may be wondering if you could live in Medicare assisted living facilities. This would mean that Medicare would pay for rent for living in the assisted living facility. Unfortunately, Medicare does not pay for you to live in assisted living facilities because it is long term living. Medicare only pays for medically necessary nursing homes or home care.

If you are looking for long term care in an assisted living facility, then you would need to get Medicaid. Medicaid will pay for you to stay in an assisted living facility. To get Medicaid you have to be living close to the poverty level. Your income and assets are used to determine whether or not you get Medicaid. You may want to check with your state to make sure that it will pay for the assisted living facility.

Once you have figured out if the government will pay for you to stay in assisted living, you can then start searching for them. You can directly ask the state to give you a list of facilities that will accept Medicaid. When my father decided to live in the assisted living, we went to several facilities to check them out. We talked to many of the staff members to get a feel for the place. We also talked to many of the other seniors living there. We eventually decided on one facility where everyone living there seemed to be pretty happy. The facility was also close to the shopping area so my dad can just walk over to the shopping plaza whenever he wanted. It is good that I can leave him in capable hands. If you cannot find a facility that is close to a shopping area, it would be good if it was close to the bus line if you cannot drive.