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[quote=Anonymous]Other posters are right that your parents need to be in a nursing home with Medicaid beds first before they qualify for long-term care Medicaid. My MIL is in a nursing home on Medicaid and the process of qualifying her was not as hard as I might have thought.

My MIL had a crisis and ended up in a nursing home by way of a hospitalization. She was discharged to rehab at a nursing home and never left. I have heard that a hospitalization is the "easiest" way to get into a nursing home, but I have no idea what the process is like if you need to get your parents into nursing home care another way.

Every state has eligibility requirements for income and assets. My MIL is in VA and I think the asset limit was something like $2k. She had about $25k to her name at the time and did not own a house. Her kids set up a funeral trust withabout $15k of it, which is an allowable way to spend down assets, and then used the rest to pay full price for the nursing home until she was below the asset limit. So essentially, there are some things you can do to protect some of your parents' assets, but you mostly "spend down" by paying for a nursing home with your parents' money until they have very little money.

I'm not sure how the asset limits work when your parents are married, and things can get complicated when one parent needs nursing home care and the other does not. Then, I believe the other spouse is allowed to keep their house and some amount of assets, but this likely varied by state and sounds like hire-a-lawyer territory. My MIL's case was pretty simple since she was widowed and had very little to begin with, so we chose to not hire a lawyer to help. There were not assets there to protect.

Best of luck OP. This is hard.[/quote]

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