The primary goal of long-term care estate planning is to protect, preserve and manage your estate if you are not well. Why is long-term care estate planning so important? Because it allows you to accomplish a number of crucial objectives:
- Be in a position to maximize your ability to preserve your estate for you and your loved ones in the event of medical crisis.
- Help ensure that your money and other assets go to the people you choose without the need of your estate going through Probate.
- Defuse potential conflicts over management of your affairs if you become disabled by having a properly crafted Advance Health Care Directive.
Planning for long-term care can involve complex evaluations and may require extensive estate planning, either in the form of modifications to your existing documents or the creation of new documents. If you require long-term care because of a chronic physical condition such as arthritis or Parkinson’s disease or a degenerative mental disease such as Alzheimer’s, who will pay for it? The answer is probably you, unless you take steps to protect yourself.
Very little, if any, long-term care is covered under health, disability or Medicare supplemental insurance policies. Medi-Cal may be an option to pay for your costs of care. Due to the high costs of nursing home care, a majority of California’s nursing home residents have part or all of their care paid for by the Medi-Cal program at some point.
