Medicaid attorneys at Parman & Easterday can provide you with assistance if you are making plans to provide a financial gift to any person who is seriously disabled or who has special needs that require specialized care. If you are planning on giving a financial gift during your lifetime or as a part of your legacy, you need to work with an attorney first so your efforts to provide financial support do not backfire.
Parman & Easterday is here to help you understand what the risks are when you provide funds to a person with special needs. Our legal team can also help you mitigate those risks and make sure a financial gift does something good to improve the life of a person with disabilities.
One of the biggest risks that you will need to address is the risk that your gift could cause the disabled person to lose access to important medical care. Medicaid attorneys at our firm can help to make sure that does not happen, so give us a call today to find out the help we can provide.
Why is Special Needs Important to Ensure Access to Healthcare Services?
If you have a loved one who has a disabling condition that is severe enough to impact working abilities, there is a good chance that loved one either currently relies on Medicaid for insurance coverage or will rely on Medicaid for insurance coverage at some time in the future.
Medicaid is a means tested benefit. If you have too much income or if you have too many assets, you will not continue to be eligible to receive Medicaid coverage. This means that when a person who is disabled and who has received a financial gift or an inheritance acquires money or property, the disabled individual may suddenly have too many assets to qualify for Medicaid coverage.
If a disabled person has too many assets to qualify for Medicaid all of a sudden because of an inheritance or gift, that individual likely will need to obtain other insurance coverage because he or she may need care as a result of the disabling condition.
Buying private insurance coverage can be a major challenge, and the out of pocket costs for premiums, copays, coinsurance costs, and deductibles are likely to be significantly higher than the costs of care were under Medicaid.
The result of this is that the person who is disabled who has lost access to Medicaid benefits as a result of receiving an inheritance may be forced into a situation where he or she must use the inheritance to pay for costly insurance and to pay for costly medical care. The coverage may not be as good as what was available when Medicaid was footing the bill, and money that was likely provided to try to enhance quality of life is instead being wasted to pay for medical coverage or medical services that Medicaid would normally have covered.
When you provide a gift for a disabled loved one, you want that money to go towards enhancing his or her quality of life, not just to be used to pay for medical bills. As a result, you should work with an experienced Medicaid attorney to structure the gift in a way that will not cause loss of access to Medicaid or to other means-tested benefits disabled people often rely on such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI).
Getting Help from Medicaid Attorneys
Medicaid attorneys at Parman & Easterday can assist you in determining if there is a risk to your disabled loved one when you provide an inheritance or an inter vivos gift. We can offer insight into whether a financial gift could cause a loss of access to important benefits and, if so, we can assist you in taking steps to ensure you are able to provide for a disabled loved one with money or property without causing substantial loss to happen.
To find out more about how our legal team can assist you with creating a Medicaid plan to provide for a disabled loved one, join us for a free seminar. You can also give us a call today at (405) 843-6100 or contact us online at any time to get personalized help providing for your loved one with a disability. Give us a call today to get your plans underway.
Since founding Parman & Easterday in 1985, Larry has led over 1,000 free, community-service education programs and helped more than 10,000 Oklahoma families go from putting off their estate plan to getting it done. His goal for every client is the same: to become the person their family calls "the one who took care of everything."
Larry is the author of three books: The Straight Shooter's Guide to Estate Planning; Estate Planning Basics; and Guiding Those Left Behind in Oklahoma. He served as Oklahoma's Secretary of State and Secretary of Commerce, and his firm is the only member of the American Academy of Estate Planning Attorneys in the state.
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