My heart went out to Daughter because she was uninformed about Medicaid recovery: had Daughter consulted with an elder law attorney, she would have learned about the “caregiver exception” that may have enabled Father to transfer the home to Daughter because she had cared for Father at his home.
If you are caring for a parent in your parent’s home, the caregiver exception may apply to you. A consultation with us about that and other Medicaid issues is a modest investment compared with what you could lose.
I am also concerned about elderly parents who are paying their children for their children’s caregiving services. There really should be a personal services agreement in place; if not and the parent runs out of money and applies for Medicaid, the payments to the children will probably be deemed to be gifts that will disqualify the parent from Medicaid services. The personal services agreement, which is a contract between the parent and child specifying the compensation for the child’s services, will be evidence that the parent was not making gifts to the child that would interfere with the parent’s Medicaid qualification.
Similarly, if an elderly parent lives with a child and pays rent, there should be a lease in place to memorialize the rent payments so that they are not considered to be gifts to the child if the parent applies for Medicaid.
These are legitimate Medicaid planning strategies that can result in valuable benefits to elderly parents and their children. I don’t want you to face the problems encountered by the daughter in that newspaper article. Like all our services, consultations about Medicaid are billed at our hourly rates, not a flat fee.