I recently had a client who was very stressed about the financial and emotional implications of moving his mother to a nursing home. Bill’s mother has Alzheimer’s disease and he had cared for her at home for over six years. Single and living at home, Bill was there to help with all of his mother’s day-to-day needs. In fact, if Bill had not been living in the house, his mother would have moved to a nursing home years earlier. Unfortunately, this family had more than their share of difficulties as Bill’s sister Michelle had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for many years. In Massachusetts nursing homes can cost between $10,000 – $15,000 per month and the children were worried that all of the family’s savings and the family home would disappear paying for their mother’s nursing home care costs. The bottom line was that they were scared that they would lose everything.

Fortunately, we were able to solve this problem. Although MassHealth typically does not allow an applicant to make gifts, there are two exceptions to this rule which pertained to this family.

• MassHealth allows a parent to give their house to a child who lives in the house and who has helped take care of them. MassHealth does not impose any penalty when a parent gives their house to a, “caretaker child”. This meant that our client could give her house to her son without causing a problem with her MassHealth application.
• MassHealth allows a parent to transfer assets to a trust for a disabled child, again without imposing any penalty or ineligibility period. We drafted a special needs trust and had the mother transfer her cash assets into the trust for the daughter’s sole benefit. The special needs trust was written so that the funds would remain available for the daughter’s benefit without impacting her future eligibility for MassHealth, Social Security or other public benefits. We filed the MassHealth application and made sure that all the documentation was presented properly to get the benefits in place.

Bill called us after we got the MassHealth application accepted and told me how much his family appreciated what we had done. The outcomes?

• We had made sure that MassHealth was paying for his mother’s nursing home costs.
• We protected a house worth $425,000 for Bill and made sure that the mother’s savings of $250,000 were available to help her disabled daughter.

This case had a successful conclusion because:

1. The family contacted us before the family member needed nursing home care.
2. We looked at the family as a whole system—making sure that we had a clear picture of every family member’s needs before moving toward a solution.

Regards,

Eric R. Oalican, Esq.
Oalican Law Group, LLC©