Medicaid recipient (LTC) and charitable donations. Anyone have experience with this?

I’d leave it in the bank. As others have said, there is a beyond huge backlog on Medicaid reviews. Basically states did a emergency eligibility &/or extensions due to Covid. But they will eventually make it back to reviewing all. State could be a real butt rash over this and find him out of compliance due to “gifting”, suspend or cancel his eligibility and then y’all have to go thru the application process again. Don’t go there if you can help it.

I would however suggest that he spends all his PNA (personal needs allowance) each & every month. Even if it means you now have shelves of toiletries and clothing replacement for him in your home. Here’s why: he is allowed to have non-exempt assets. Most states have this at 2K max. Plus he gets to keep a part of his monthly income as the PNA. Most states have this at $50 or $60 a mo. @ $50mo that’s a max of $ 2,600 a yr of assets possibly for him. Spend it down so he’s got very little in nonexempt assets so that if & when the caseworker finally gets around reviewing to the real estate windfall % of his, they can let him keep $2K and the rest gets a spend down unless he can give to a charity.

Emergency situations happen. When Hurricane Katrina hit, my MIL New Orleans NH move en masse to Houston. She was on LA LTC Medicaid as were most. A lot still owned a home & several had extended family living in it. All fine by LA Medicaid. TX Medicaid took all in & went onto TX LTC Medicaid. Minimal questions asked. Around 6-8 months later all got letters from TX Medicaid asking for details as to their prior situation in Louisiana. A few months after that, those that had homes back in LA got letters as to their change in eligibility. That home or property in LA was now a nonexempt asset so they were ineligible. Some were partial owners of a home (their kids or a sibling owned the other part) but still had % ownership and it too was now a nonexempt asset. TX Medicaid did a property search to look for name match-ups & sent letters out to those properties to ask clarification as to ownership and if insurance proceeds paid. Their choices were stark, if they wanted to keep the home they had to find a NH somewhere in LA to go to; if they wanted to stay in TX the old home had to be placed up for sale & sold at FMV, rotflmao. If insurance proceeds were paid & not fully spent on property, it was income, so ineligible. It was awful as most had homes flooded unliveable, their family tended to be themselves displaced; you could not get repairs done much less sell. All this to ferret out ineligiblity based on events that happened in basically a 2 week period the year b4. But TX Medicaid did it. My point is Covid is way way bigger situation. I cannot imagine the backlog. But eventually things will surface. Let the $ sit at the bank imo.

Medicaid rules address gifting for a reason. If you are poor enough to be eligible to get federal dollars via state managed payments to pay for your bed and medical needs, you should not have enough to give/gift money to others.

Since COVID many review dates were just bumped to the future without any real review. I know they did it in Texas so other states may have used the same process.

Its possible an elder atty can put the money into a trust for future needs for brotherinlaw. There may come a time he needs more specialized equipment than NH will provide. ie more comfortable wheel chair, better mattress, someone to sit with him. I would definitely check into trust

newbiewife: Perhaps you should pose your query to an elder law attorney.

Technically isn't he the charity case since he's on Medicaid?

Thanks. I'd forgotten about the stimulus checks being permitted to be used for charitable donations. The state also recently distributed $850 payments to individual taxpayers from surplus, so I suspect that too could be used for donations. Maine is unusually generous in the amount of assets a Medicaid LTC resident can maintain and still qualify--an additional $8,000 above the Federal ceiling of $2,000, so $10,000 total.

I agree with JoAnn29 that perhaps if the covid funds and the cash from the property sale are co-mingled in a single account, and so as long as the donation doesn't exceed the amount of the covid distribution, it should be fine? You could contact a Medicaid Planner for your BIL's state of residence and this person should be able to give you the most accurate answer. I think Medicaid eyebrows will be raised depending on how much the donations are. My MIL is on Medicaid and she will occasionally give a cash gift ($15-$25) in a birthday card to one of her grand or great-grandkids. It's not often, though.

I am surprised nothing has been said about the xtra money but maybe because of COVID. You can buy him new clothes, a computer anything HE needs but I would not spend it on Charities.

The stimulus check was the only thing that could be given to a charity.