Advance planning happens while you are healthy and arranges assets around Pennsylvania’s five-year look-back. Crisis planning begins after a parent or spouse already needs nursing home care. Our attorneys at Kreisher Marshall & Associates, LLC, approach Medicaid planning very differently depending on which situation describes your family.
What Is Advance Medicaid Planning?
Advance planning reorganizes ownership of your home, savings, and investments ahead of any application, so the transfers have already cleared the look-back by the time eligibility gets reviewed. Nothing about it is hidden, because every transfer gets reported and documented.
Common Advance Planning Tools
Advance planning uses a combination of strategies rather than a single document. The right approach depends on your marital status, your home’s value and equity, your assets, and the people you want to inherit your estate:
- Irrevocable trusts funded with the family home or investment accounts
- Long-term care insurance purchased while you still qualify medically
- Life estate deeds that pass the remainder interest but preserve your right to live there
- Beneficiary designations corrected so accounts do not reach the wrong person
Pennsylvania closely scrutinizes trusts, and under 55 Pa. Code § 178.7, assets in a trust that still allow you access to the principal may count toward Medicaid eligibility. The trust’s terms matter far more than its title.
What Is Crisis Medicaid Planning?
Crisis planning begins once someone has entered a facility or will shortly, and the family faces private-pay bills running thousands of dollars a month. The goal shifts from protecting everything to protecting as much as the rules still permit.
Strategies Used In A Crisis Application
Crisis planning focuses on a smaller set of strategies, many of which convert countable assets into resources that Pennsylvania excludes for the purposes of Medicaid eligibility. Applications are filed through the county assistance office, and complete, accurate supporting documentation often determines the outcome and whether benefits are approved without unnecessary delays:
- Transfers to a healthy spouse
- Medicaid-compliant annuities that turn savings into an income stream
- Prepaid irrevocable burial reserves
- Home repairs, a replacement vehicle, or paying down a mortgage
Pennsylvania applies no transfer penalty between spouses. Crisis planning for a married couple therefore protects far more than crisis planning for a widow or widower, and couples in Bloomsburg and Berwick keep a community spouse resource allowance calculated from their combined countable assets.
Why Does Advance Planning Protect More?
Advance planning starts with a full picture of what you own and ends with choices you made yourself. Crisis planning starts with an admission packet and a spend-down worksheet, and circumstances outside your control have already narrowed every option on the table.
Sit Down With Kreisher Marshall & Associates, LLC
Whichever stage fits your family, Kreisher Marshall & Associates, LLC reviews the assets, the paperwork, and the application itself from offices in Bloomsburg and State College. Call (814) 458-6294 or contact us online, and a Certified Elder Law Attorney will tell you plainly what can still be protected for your spouse and your children.