What should we recommend to our OPs?

I’m not sure there is one best place. Our family was beyond blessed by the business manager of mom’s nursing home. She knew all the information and intricacies of Medicaid inside out and walked us through the entire process at no cost. She had many years of experience and knowledge. I’m well aware not every place has such a person, but it was a lifesaver for us

Alva, this is a great question / discussion. Because of cost and also bc so many elderly are flat out attorney adverse & maybe someone in the fam thinks they can do online legal low cost nonsense. Sooooo perhaps Area Agency on Aging??? , aka the AAA or AoA??? Plus they are your tax dollars at work. So should be at no to low cost.

All States have AAA / AoA as they get $ from vintage federal 1960’s Older Americans Act and it’s more recent amendment PL 100-365 funding and are also almost usually affiliated with a Council of Governments (COGs) which exist in all States. So have buildings and staffing. COGs get federal $ to do coordination of federal $ that cross jurisdictional lines. COGs kinda exist on the down low & have professional staff with political influenced boards by & large plus community organizations. Nowadays do lots of transportation & water use, as those are heavy federal / city / county / state X boundaries work.

For alot of places the AAA / AoA are big, & well funded, has its own building(s) with FT staff separate from the COG even tho CoG still their “parent” and liaison to other entities as needed. AAA does caregiver training, needs assessments, care plans, application help. Other States don’t give as much $ so those AAA / AoA don’t get much downstream funding so more volunteerish. But still AAA are still there for assistance.

"Geriatric Care Managers charge clients in a variety of ways, but typically their hourly rates are between $50-$200 / hr. Medicare, Medicaid and health insurance very rarely pay for these costs."

Source: https://www.payingforseniorcare.com/find_geriatric_care_managers#:~:text=GCMs%20are%20also%20referred%20to,and%20service%20or%20care%20coordinators.&text=Geriatric%20Care%20Managers%20charge%20clients,rarely%20pay%20for%20these%20costs.

"Commission-Based Medicaid Planners:

They provide free services to families and individuals and take a commission when they purchase Medicaid-Compliant Annuities to help applicants meet the Medicaid asset limits."

Source: https://www.medicaidplanningassistance.org/types-of-medicaid-planners/#:~:text=Commission%2DBased%20Medicaid%20Planners,-This%20category%20of&text=They%20provide%20free%20services%20to,meet%20the%20Medicaid%20asset%20limits.

Alva, part of the problem is that there is a nasty learning curve for family members who smack into the brick wall of elder care crisis. Any education is like drinking from a firehose while their LO is spiraling out of control behaviorally or medically. I've been on the curve since 2016 and haven't gotten off yet.

Honestly Nextdoor.com is a wealth of lived-experience opinions and guidance. It would be my first stop in asking for direction on anything.

Local Senior Centers may have info;

my MN Area Agency on Aging is very well staffed and run, but this depends on your county;

the local county social services website will have info (but again all depends on the state/county)

Where I used to live, there was an office of paralegals. Mother and daughters, I think. They weren't attorneys but could help with forms, filings and other things. I believe they kept quite busy because there was a large elder population there. So if it's not legal opinion that someone needs, if they just need forms filled out, notarized and registered at the courthouse, paralegals could fill that need. If they couldn't do what the client needed, they'd let them know and refer them elsewhere.

Geaton, that financial expert was, to me at least, sounding like your typical annuity salesman, an IRREVOCABLE TRUST salesman, and someone out to use our inborn greed to "protect our money/stuff" to get us to buy his product.
He even wrote out a long disclaimer saying he had no fiduciary duty (first flag warning) and his column represented everything I fear getting recommended to our OPS.
That's my opinion only; He WAS knowledgeable, but of course he is connected as an advertiser to this page, and there was some sort of agreement he would be here for some amount of time. He clearly had no other interest in this page other than that. I think he didn't pause long enough to let a door hit his backside.

I understand what you are saying. But when someone who clearly CANNOT negotiate the internet as you can due to age or education, and is told "Your Mom (sister husband whomever) needs medicaid" (as one OP was told today), someone who needs support just doing the paperwork, I don't know what to tell them.

I know you are right about volunteers. AARP has a call out on our NextDoor this week asking for volunteers to be trained to do tax help for seniors. Now, asking me to come and IN ANY WAY get qualified in minimal training to help a senior with his/ her taxes is truly the blind leading the blind, and a huge mistake. I don't doubt for a SECOND that you got little help from volunteers.

You are a very bright woman. I would trust you could find a way to negotiate all these systems somehow. Perhaps I could begin to as well as when I was asked to be POA/Trustee for my bro I was ignorant as a newborn and had to self educate quick. Actually I came directly HERE wailing.

I just wish there was more support out there for the elderly I guess is what I am saying, in negotiating this tough new techie world.

Alva, it depends on the info they need. People need to learn how to do effective searches (eg: MN+"Concilliation court"+forms+2023). There is no one place for everything. And my personal experience with the S. Lucie County (FL) Area Agency on Aging has been dismal. All volunteer staff, never got a live person on the phone, several voice messages never returned.

People's county social services are probably as good a consolidation of certain resources as any. Many non-profits don't come up in the first-page search on Google.

People in rural areas have even more of a challenge getting help because of lower populations and resources.

And on this forum, the articles posted by professionals: how often do they update them? The info needed by participants here can change every few months.

Agingcare.com recently made available a financial "expert" to answer questions... where is that thread? How would a newbie even know this thread existed? I can't even remember what it is called.

The good news is that there's lots and lots of information on the internet. The bad news is there is lots and lots of information on the internet. That's why my search metrics always include the year, so I get the freshest info possible.

I am hoping igloo is around and might comment here? Because so far we are getting a lot of comments that our OPs may have some idea where to go to get help, but cannot AFFORD to go there. That was actually the motivation for my writing this post. My question again is WHERE can we send them for good information? That is FREE for them. I know with taxes that AARP has in many areas free workshops for seniors. But where is the free workshop for trying to get Medicaid, for finding out what care is available and affordable in one's own area?
I am still left with the only idea I have which is aginglifecare.org for recommendations of geriatric care managers in their area. And as Geaton says, that may be expensive and unavailable.
Continuing to follow and sure would appreciate any ideas to get help to our OPs.

I think what someone is willing to pay is not always what they are able to pay. A lot of posters who get the advice to call an elder care attorney are already describing a situation where they are living on a shoestring budget to begin with, and the recommendation to hire someone at hundreds of dollars an hour must seem to them as attainable as going to the moon. And "use mom/dad's money" is great, so long as 1) mom/dad have the money and 2) the person asking the question has easy access to it. There are a lot of people in this country who are house rich but cash poor, and for them extra money on hand is a rarity.

No government agency in this country makes it easy to navigate their individual systems, especially the agencies that are responsible to pay for social services to those who need them. I think that's done on purpose; if the people who need the services are borderline in their need, I can see where those people might abandon the idea of applying under the guise of "it's not worth it, we'll figure it out without these benefits". When I volunteered at a private food bank, I spoke with people who fell into that category. It was easier to go to a few different privately run food banks to get enough to supplement their groceries rather than jump through the SNAP hoops. And I don't see that getting any better with the sudden influx of people who are needing massive amounts of social services. It's a sad reality, but it is what it is.

Insofar as this message board, I find myself reading quite a few of the posts, but not responding to many of them unless I have some real, constructive advice I can give. For example, I rarely comment on dealing with ALZ, because I have no first-hand experience in caring for someone with it, so I feel as though my advice would not be germane to the discussion. If I want to say anything in those cases, I just offer sympathy and hugs. It doesn't feel like enough, but I would rather not muddy the waters with un-useful advice or ridiculous platitudes.

Geaton,I saw that post and that is an exact example of what I meant in my response.

Riverdale, there was a recent post here in Discussions that was just one word, "Denial". The OP had no info in their profile. I had commented, "What is a river in Egypt? #Jeopardy" but I think the admins removed the post. Is it like drunk texting?

Some places have very few (if any) Geriatric Managers. My state (MN) was one of them back in 2016-ish but now there are more, and they are very busy because there's not enough of them.

Also, they cost money and many of the OPs are already bleeding funds thanks to their situations.

I am always perplexed at the fact that many OPs can search and find their way to this site but not online search and find GMs, CELAs, free legal help, the local social services, renter's rights, etc.

This is not an exact answer however I wish the generally new people to this forum would at least post a question that is a sentence (mimimally) as opposed to just one word as though answers to that are easy to guess. I sometimes am amazed at those who try to help when just one word is the post.