Medicare has detailed information about every Medicare and Medicaid-certified nursing home in the country. Before you get started, you or your family member may have other long-term care choices like community-based services, home care, or assisted living depending on your needs and resources. Otherwise, click on the above and follow the steps when choosing a nursing home: Step 1: Find Nursing Homes in your area. Search by name, city, county, state, or ZIP code. Step 2: Compare the quality of the nursing Homes you're considering using the Five-Star Quality Ratings, health inspection results, nursing home staff data, quality measures,…
Entering a nursing home can provide provide peace of mind for your elderly parent. But if proper asset protection planning for the monies involved in nursing home care and estate planning are not done in advance, it can put your loved one at risk financially. Especially for seniors on Medicaid, there are important considerations to take before moving into a nursing home. Many seniors own a home, and depending on what is done with a home before moving into the nursing home can greatly affect their assets. Before deciding on selling the family home or transferring it to a family…
Some mistakenly dismiss elder law as something with which they need not concern themselves until they personally need help getting by each day. However, at the Elder Law office we work with many local residents on these issues decades before they need care themselves. That is because many adult children are forced to deal with these concerns on behalf of their parents–many of whom have serious health concerns that arise quite quickly. With demographic changes leading to a boom in the elderly population, the need to care for aging parents is catching more and more adult children by surprise. According…
Emergency plans required by the government often lack specific steps such as coordinating with local authorities, notifying relatives or even pinning name tags and medication lists to residents in an evacuation, according to the findings. That means the plans may not be worth the paper they're written on states the USA Today Nearly seven years after Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans exposed the vulnerability of nursing homes, serious shortcomings persist. "We identified many of the same gaps in nursing home preparedness and response," investigators from the inspector general's office of the Health and Human Services Department wrote in the…
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services launched its “National Initiative to Improve Behavioral Health & Reduce the Use of Antipsychotic Medications in Nursing Home Residents." The initiative aims to raise awareness of antipsychotic misuse, improve regulatory oversight and train nursing home workers on non-drug treatments for aggressive and agitated dementia behaviors. When prescribed inappropriately, resident advocates have argued, antipsychotics can increase the risk of death for nursing home residents with dementia. They say increased nursing home staffing levels and extra training, among other measures, can help curb the use of such drugs. Groups such as the American Health Care…
At the Elder Law Office of David Wingate, LLC we assist clients who are faced with the possible placement of a spouse or parent in a nursing home. We counsel clients in navigating the complex and confusing Medicaid rules and regulations which pertain to nursing home care. Consequently, we assist in long term care planning to best situate your loved one for possible placement in a nursing home. Furthermore, we aid and counsel them in securing maximum financial protection and in preserving assets for the spouse who will remain at home and in applying for Medicaid eligibility. We also help…
Planning for assisted living costs should be at the top of your aging parent’s mind, or your mind. Because nursing home, assisted living, and adult day care costs are constantly increasing. As stated in the MetLife Mature Market Institute’s annual survey the cost of these types of long-term care have increased by 5.6 percent since the previous year. A private room in a nursing home averaged $87,000 a year and adult day programs cost $42,000 a year. Assisted living costs increase as your parents require additional care. Therefore, facilities can charge hundreds more a month for bathing, incontinence care, and…
The Elder Law Office of David Wingate, LLC. has announced the release of “Elder Law Handbook.” The guidebook contains and explains what adult children of elderly parents need to do to make sure their loved ones are taken care of, while ensuring their financial health at the same time. As a community service, this guidebook is free of charge. Please email our office and we will send it too you. As parents age, their children will have to deal with their parents’ health issues, and financial concerns will likely become an issue they will have to face. When the children…
If you are on Medicare and spend 3 days (midnights) admitted to a hospital, you will qualify for rehabilitation in a nursing home. Consequently, Medicare will pay the first twenty days, and you will be in a co-pay with Medicare up to 100 days. However, the trend is, hospitals are under significant pressure from Medicare to fully treat a person once they are “admitted” to the hospital. There are guidelines that the hospital has to meet basically to ensure that person stays healthy once they are dismissed from the hospital. Therefore, hospitals are bringing a person in for “observation” for…
With more than 1.6 million Americans now living in nursing homes, many of us are all too familiar with the debilitating cycle of a nursing home admission followed by repeated hospitalizations, a spiraling into decline, and ultimately death. A Brown University study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, confirms what many of us have observed: health care transitions, such as moves in and out of the hospital from a nursing home, do not lead to positive outcomes. More common are frequent medical errors; poor care coordination, infections and additional medications. For patients with acute dementia, these transitions can…
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