Planning for long-term care gives you the opportunity to decide where and how you want to live when you need more assistance than you used to. You can give yourself and your loved ones peace of mind by deciding:
- Where you’d prefer to receive care
- How you’ll pay for it
- Who can manage your affairs if you’re unable to do so
- How to best protect the estate you’ve built over your lifetime
At Brightside, we can help you prepare for long-term care as part of your broader estate and elder law planning. In this guide, we go over how the right choices can reflect how you want to eventually live while preserving as much choice and independence as possible.
What Is Long-Term Care Planning?
Long-term care planning prepares you for a time when you may need ongoing help with daily activities due to changes in your ability to live independently. Long-term care can include:
- Assistance with bathing
- Dressing
- Eating
- Using the bathroom
- Preparing meals
- Other everyday tasks
Care can take place in your home, a family member’s home, a community setting, or a nursing facility, depending on your needs and available services.
Note: Georgia has Medicaid programs that allow eligible residents to receive long-term services outside a nursing facility. The waiver programs can provide services such as personal support, home health services, respite care, and service coordination for people who meet the eligibility criteria. This makes your preferred care setting an important part of planning, since long-term assistance doesn’t automatically mean moving into a nursing home.
How Can a Georgia Elder Law Attorney Help With Long-Term Care Planning?
A Georgia elder law attorney can connect your long-term care plans with Medicaid eligibility, property ownership, incapacity planning, and your estate plan. At Brightside, we help you evaluate these considerations together so that decisions made for future care support your broader goals.
- Medicaid Eligibility Planning: We can review your income, resources, marital status, and care needs under the Medicaid rules that apply to long-term services. This advance step can identify any eligibility concerns and planning opportunities before you submit an application.
- Asset Transfer Review: Gifts and transfers for less than fair market value can affect Medicaid eligibility during the applicable five-year lookback period. We can review previous transactions and advise you about the Medicaid consequences of proposed gifts, property transfers, or ownership changes before you complete them.
- Spousal Protection Planning: When one spouse needs long-term care, Medicaid rules contain protections for a spouse who remains in the community. We can evaluate the couple’s income and resources under these provisions and explain how they affect long-term care planning.
- Power of Attorney Preparation: A financial power of attorney can give a person you select authority to handle designated financial affairs on your behalf. In Georgia, a power of attorney is generally effective when executed unless the document provides otherwise, and it can be structured to support financial, property, and long-term care planning if you later become incapacitated.
- Health Care Planning: A Georgia Advance Directive for Health Care allows you to select a health care agent and record your treatment preferences. We can prepare this document as part of a plan that establishes who can make health care decisions if you become unable to make them yourself.
- Estate Plan Coordination: Medicaid planning decisions can affect property you intend to leave to beneficiaries. We can review your will, trusts, beneficiary designations, and property ownership alongside your long-term care plans to identify conflicts and determine which documents need revision.
- Estate Recovery Planning: Georgia can seek reimbursement from certain estates for qualifying Medicaid long-term care benefits paid during a recipient’s lifetime. We can evaluate potential estate recovery when planning for Medicaid and consider its effect on property you intend to transfer later on.
Why Should You Plan for Long-Term Care Before You Need It?
With long-term care planning, you can evaluate your choices before daily assistance becomes necessary. Not only does this give you greater control over your future, but you also have sufficient time to revisit your arrangements as your finances, family situation, or care preferences change.
- Greater Control Over Care Arrangements: Depending on your needs, care may be provided at home, through community-based programs, in a personal care or assisted living setting, or in a nursing facility. Evaluating these alternatives before care is needed can help you establish priorities for housing, daily assistance, family involvement, and professional services.
- Coordinated Planning for Care Expenses: Long-term care expenses may be paid through personal income and assets, long-term care insurance, Medicaid, or a combination of available resources. Reviewing these funding sources together can show how long your personal resources may support care and when public benefits may become necessary.
- Advance Preparation for Medicaid Eligibility: Georgia Medicaid applies financial and nonfinancial eligibility criteria to Long-Term Services and Supports, including income, resource, and level-of-care rules. Reviewing these rules in advance can help you avoid gifts, property transfers, or ownership changes that conflict with your long-term care plan.
- Authority for Financial and Health Care Decisions: Long-term care planning should address who can act for you if illness or incapacity prevents you from managing your finances or communicating health care choices. A properly prepared financial power of attorney can grant an agent authority over designated financial affairs, while a Georgia Advance Directive for Health Care allows you to appoint a health care agent and state treatment preferences.
- Coordination With Existing Estate Planning: A long-term care strategy can affect wills, trusts, beneficiary designations, property ownership, and plans for transferring assets after death. Coordinating these areas can help preserve your intended distribution of property while accounting for future care needs and applicable benefit rules.
- Consideration of Medicaid Estate Recovery: Georgia’s Medicaid Estate Recovery Program can seek reimbursement from certain estates for nursing facility services and home and community-based services. Reviewing estate recovery before relying on Medicaid can help you assess how property may be treated later and incorporate that potential claim into your estate and long-term care planning.
When Should You Review Your Long-Term Care Plan?
Events that can prompt a review include:
- A New Medical Diagnosis: Certain diagnoses can change the type of assistance you anticipate needing. Reviewing your plan at that point can help you evaluate potential care settings, available resources, insurance benefits, and the authority granted to your chosen representatives.
- Death or Incapacity of a Spouse: Your spouse may play several roles in your existing plan, including serving as an agent, beneficiary, joint property owner, or source of caregiving assistance. If your spouse dies or becomes unable to perform these roles, your legal documents, property arrangements, and plans for future care may need revision.
- Retirement: Retirement can change your income sources, insurance arrangements, assets, and monthly expenses. It’s also an appropriate time to examine how retirement accounts, Social Security benefits, pensions, savings, and long-term care insurance could contribute to future care expenses.
- Changes in Your Assets or Income: Selling real estate, receiving an inheritance, changing investments, transferring property, or experiencing a substantial change in income can affect long-term care funding and potential Medicaid eligibility. Reviewing your plan before making major transfers can also help identify Medicaid transfer rules that may apply.
- Changes in Family Support: A relative you expected to assist may relocate, develop health concerns, or become unable to serve in that role. Conversely, another family member may become available to help. Updating your plan can reflect who can provide practical assistance and who should hold legal decision-making authority.
- A Change in Living Arrangements: Moving to a different residence, beginning home-based assistance, entering a personal care home or assisted living community, or considering nursing facility care can change your expenses and benefit options. A review can determine how your current payment plan and legal documents apply to the new arrangement.
- Changes to Insurance: Long-term care insurance benefits, premiums, policy terms, or available coverage can affect how you plan to pay for assistance. Reviewing the policy alongside your other resources can show how its benefits fit with private payment and potential Medicaid eligibility.
- Changes in Georgia Medicaid Rules: Medicaid eligibility limits and program requirements can change. If Medicaid is part of your long-term care strategy, periodic review can confirm that your planning remains consistent with the rules in effect at that time.
Keeping your long-term care plan current helps preserve the choices you made while allowing the plan to evolve with your life.
FAQs About Long-Term Care Planning in Georgia
How Can You Pay for Long-Term Care in Georgia?
You have several options for covering long-term care costs in Georgia. They include:
Private Funds: You can use income, savings, retirement funds, investments, and other available assets. Private payment gives you the ability to select services based on your preferences without relying on eligibility for a public benefit program. However, because care may be ongoing, you’ll want to consider how those expenses could affect the resources you use for housing, living expenses, a spouse’s needs, and your estate plan.
Long-Term Care Insurance: Long-term care insurance can pay benefits for qualifying services. Coverage varies, so your planning should include a review of where benefits can be used, what conditions trigger payment, how long benefits continue, the maximum benefit amount, and any waiting period before payments begin.
Georgia Long-Term Care Partnership Policies: Georgia’s Long-Term Care Partnership Program combines qualifying private long-term care insurance with Medicaid asset protection. Each dollar paid in benefits by a Partnership policy allows one dollar of assets to be disregarded when applying the Medicaid long-term care asset limit. These assets are also protected from Medicaid estate recovery up to the amount of qualifying insurance benefits paid.
Medicaid: Georgia Medicaid provides Long-Term Services and Supports in nursing facilities as well as home and community settings for people who meet the applicable requirements. Eligibility can depend on income and resources along with functional status, age, citizenship, medical needs, Georgia residency, and the level of care required.
For many families, long-term care funding isn’t limited to a single payment source. Personal resources may pay for one period of care, insurance benefits may pay for another, and Medicaid may become available if eligibility requirements are met. Evaluating these resources together can help you establish a financial plan that supports your care preferences while accounting for your other long-term priorities.
What is Georgia’s Elderly & Disabled Waiver Program?
For older adults and people with disabilities, Georgia’s Elderly & Disabled Waiver Program includes the Community Care Services Program (CCSP) and Service Options Using Resources in a Community Environment (SOURCE). These programs serve qualifying residents who meet a nursing facility level-of-care standard. Depending on the recipient’s approved plan, services can include:
Service Coordination: Assistance with managing authorized services and care needs.
Personal Support: Help with activities of daily living, including bathing, dressing, meals, and housekeeping.
Adult Day Health Care: Daytime services for eligible participants who can remain in the community with appropriate assistance.
Alternative Living Services: Residential services available through the waiver for qualifying participants.
Home-Delivered Meals: Meal services that can support eligible participants living in community settings.
Respite Care: Temporary assistance that provides relief for family caregivers.
Home Health Services: Qualifying nursing, home health aide, and therapy services can be available through Georgia’s waiver programs.
Applicants must satisfy Medicaid’s financial criteria and qualify for the level of care that would otherwise be provided in a nursing facility or another qualifying institution. Services are then based on the participant’s assessed needs and the benefits authorized under the program.
How Does Your Home Factor into Medicaid Planning?
The good news is that home ownership by itself does not necessarily prevent Medicaid eligibility. However, special rules apply to the home, including an annually adjusted home-equity limit for certain long-term care Medicaid applicants and exceptions when a spouse or qualifying child lives in the home. Under Georgia’s current program, estates with a gross value of $25,000 or less are exempt from recovery. Recovery is also delayed when there is a:
Surviving spouse
Surviving child under age 21
Surviving child who is blind or permanently and totally disabled
Your home can be one of the assets you most want to preserve for a spouse or future beneficiaries, so its treatment should be addressed as part of your long-term care plan. Reviewing Medicaid eligibility, potential estate recovery, property ownership, and your estate planning documents together can help you determine how the residence fits into your plans before making changes to the title or ownership.
Speak to a Georgia Elder Law Attorney Today
A well-prepared long-term plan can address where you want to receive care, how you intend to pay for assistance, and how Medicaid planning may affect your property and estate. Addressing these issues in advance can also help your family carry out the decisions you’ve already made rather than determining your preferences later.
At Brightside, we help Georgia residents and their families develop long-term care plans that account for Medicaid, estate planning, asset transfers, incapacity planning, and potential estate recovery. We can review your current arrangements, identify areas that need attention, and prepare the legal documents necessary to carry out your plans. To schedule an initial consultation, call our elder care law firm at 404-492-9559 or fill out our online contact form.