Tuesday, January 26, 2010

The Basics Of Qualifying For Colorado Medicaid - What You Can And Cannot Keep

In order to understand the process of Medicaid qualification in Colorado, you must first understand how Medicaid treats your assets.

Basically Medicaid breaks your assets into two separate categories. The first are those assets that are "free" and the second is the assets that are "not free" or countable.

Exempt assets are those which Medicaid will not be considered (at least initially). In general, the following assets of the tax will be exempt:


The house, untilup to $ 500,000 in equity. The apartment must be the principal residence. The nursing home resident has, may be necessary to show "intent to return home" even if this never actually takes place.
Household and personal items such as furniture, appliances, jewelry and clothing.
A vehicle of any value.
Prepaid funeral plans and grave sites.
Present value of life insurance, as long as the nominal value of all policies together does not exceed $ 1,500. If it does not exceedTotal of $ 1500 face value, then the cash value in these policies is countable. In addition, term life insurance is exempt.
Cash (eg a small checking or savings account) not to exceed $ 2000.

These are essentially the assets to ignore the Medicaid, at least for the moment. Please note however, that the estate recovery unit again came to recoup Medicaid payments to a beneficiary upon the death of the beneficiary of the recipient spouse.All other assets that are not exempt and can(ie those not listed above) are countable. This includes checking accounts, savings accounts, savings bonds, money market accounts, stocks, funds, bonds, IRAs, pensions, second cars and so on. While there are some minor exceptions to these rules are, in most cases is all the money and property, and converts all items will be assessed and may be in cash, a countable advantage, unless it's one of those previously excluded as.

While the Medicaid rules themselves aresomewhat complicated and difficult for a single person, it's safe to say that you qualify for Medicaid, as long as you only exempt assets plus a small amount of cash.

For a married couple, the community spouse (ie, you do not need), nursing home care can usually keep $ 104,400. Of course, this does not mean there is not, what can be done to protect assets over the layer. Instead, this information is developed to the basics in a way that a clerk of the reviewMedicaid will do it.



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