Elder Law
As we get older, many of us are faced with difficult and important decisions regarding our healthcare and our financial well-being. We can help you plan for both the present and the future through the use of wills, trusts, powers of attorney, living wills, and health care directives.
Medical Assistance - Many families face the issue of how to pay for the astronomical cost of nursing homes. In this community it is not unusual for an individual to spend more than $50,000.00 for nursing home care in a single year. It is not hard to imagine that the savings of a lifetime can be wiped out in just a few years of nursing home care.
People understandably want to be able to protect some of their assets for their children or grandchildren. People are especially interested in protecting homes and cottages to pass from one generation to the next and frequently come to us to ask if we can help them plan for the potential of a nursing home stay.
We have extensive experience in medical assistance planning for clients in both Wisconsin and Michigan. We treat every situation as a unique case and work with clients and families to help them negotiate the very complicated, and sometimes contradictory regulations and considerations that affect the individual family's decisions in this very complicated area.
Because medical assistance is a program designed to provide minimal medical care for the very poor who cannot afford it for themselves, medical assistance requires that you be extremely poor to qualify. Because the program is both a Federal and State program, there are both Federal and State laws and a separate set of Federal and State regulations that apply with respect to the program. When you live in a border community such as we do, there are often different regulations from one state to the next, and there are even circumstances where a resident of Michigan coming into a Wisconsin nursing home can be treated more favorably by the State of Wisconsin than a lifelong resident of the State of Wisconsin.
Some decisions made to qualify for Medicaid can have disastrous income tax or other consequences to the family. For example, individuals can sell their home in which they have a very substantial gain under most circumstances and totally avoid paying any income tax on that gain, but if a parent gives that home to a child who then sells it, the entire price of the home could be classified as ordinary income tax subject to tax at the highest tax rate.
It is not unusual for families to want to give assets away to children, but they often do not consider what happens if the children divorce, die, or incur some serious judgment against them which could have disastrous impacts upon the assets which individuals think that their children are holding for them. There are things that can be done which can meet the needs of a family, but this is an area more, than almost any other, where individual planning and a full understanding of all of the issues is critical. There are attorneys who come into communities, give seminars, and suggest to everyone in the seminar that they need a particular kind of trust, for example, in order to qualify for Medicaid. While such trusts make perfect sense in some cases, they can be disastrous from a legal, personal, or tax standpoint for others. Given the extremely high cost of nursing home care and the fact that in many cases individuals are trying to preserve the work and efforts of a lifetime, it is especially important, we believe, for individuals to meet with an attorney on an individual basis to fully discuss their own situation, their goals, their desires, and to understand what options they have and trade-offs they must accept in order to accomplish their purposes. There is simply no substitute for a personal visit in this area because there are truly no "one size fits all answers."
We have helped hundreds of individuals deal with medical assistance issues in both Michigan and Wisconsin. We treat each case as a separate one and work to find the best solution for each family's situation.
Nursing Home Issues - We represent clients in claims involving nursing homes and other managed health care facilities. Our firm works with individuals, nursing homes and other long-term care facilities in cases involving:
- Medication errors
- Falls
- Abuse
- Infections
- Malnutrition
- Dehydration
We are aware of the sensitive nature of these types of cases and strive to provide the best possible representation in a dignified, cost-effective, and professional manner.