You are referring to a "Pooled Supplemental Needs Trust" and it is indeed a Medicaid planning tool designed to assist those with assets over the resource limit with Medicaid eligibility.
I love this tool because it assists Medicaid beneficiaries with their true needs while making good public policy via the "payback" provision inherent in these arrangements.
If your father is in a nursing home, has assets, and is currently paying privately, he can indeed use this trust to immediately qualify for Medicaid while protecting his assets for his own use while receiving benefits.
It works like this: The trust is established and maintained by a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Therefore, you do not need to hire an attorney to draft a new trust; your father will simply be completing a "joinder agreement" to the existing trust.
All assets above the Medicaid resource limit (typically $2,000 in most states) are transferred to the trust. Your father becomes eligible for Medicaid in the month of the transfer.
The assets transferred are available for virtually anything regarding his health, maintenance, and welfare while in the nursing home. The trustee administering the trust will give you the specifics, but typically the list of eligible expenditures is quite long and includes necessities like eyeglasses, dental work, hearing aides, and clothing and can extend to things like legal fees, entertainment items, upgrade to a private room, newspapers, etc. etc.
The caveat is that this is a Medicaid "payback" trust in that at the grantor's (your father's) demise any funds remaining in the trust must first be used to payback Medicaid to the extent benefits were expended for him. Any residual thereafter may go to heirs.
Do a search for "pooled supplemental needs trust Massachusetts" and those that are available will come up. I strongly urge you to consider using this tool.
Under Medicaid rules, his assets can only be used for his care, they cannot be transferred or gifted away. If he is already on Medicaid or will be within five years, it is waaaay too late for putting anything in a trust. Planning for long-term care is something you do when you are 50 years old or younger.
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I love this tool because it assists Medicaid beneficiaries with their true needs while making good public policy via the "payback" provision inherent in these arrangements.
If your father is in a nursing home, has assets, and is currently paying privately, he can indeed use this trust to immediately qualify for Medicaid while protecting his assets for his own use while receiving benefits.
It works like this:
The trust is established and maintained by a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Therefore, you do not need to hire an attorney to draft a new trust; your father will simply be completing a "joinder agreement" to the existing trust.
All assets above the Medicaid resource limit (typically $2,000 in most states) are transferred to the trust. Your father becomes eligible for Medicaid in the month of the transfer.
The assets transferred are available for virtually anything regarding his health, maintenance, and welfare while in the nursing home. The trustee administering the trust will give you the specifics, but typically the list of eligible expenditures is quite long and includes necessities like eyeglasses, dental work, hearing aides, and clothing and can extend to things like legal fees, entertainment items, upgrade to a private room, newspapers, etc. etc.
The caveat is that this is a Medicaid "payback" trust in that at the grantor's (your father's) demise any funds remaining in the trust must first be used to payback Medicaid to the extent benefits were expended for him. Any residual thereafter may go to heirs.
Do a search for "pooled supplemental needs trust Massachusetts" and those that are available will come up. I strongly urge you to consider using this tool.
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Planning for long-term care is something you do when you are 50 years old or younger.