MEDICAID

Medicaid is a joint Federal and state government program that helps pay medical costs for some people with limited incomes and resources. People with Medicaid may get coverage for services such as nursing home and home health care, if they meet the eligibility requirements for Medicaid. Who is eligible and what services are covered vary from state to state. Most often, eligibility is based on your income and personal resources, but for coverage of long-term care services, you must also meet certain health or functional criteria to be eligible.

Each year, more than 23,000 Arkansans who have chronic, long-term medical needs require services in long-term care facilities. These individuals live in the approximately 236 nursing facilities and 40 intermediate care facilities for the mentally challenged that are licensed to provide long-term care services in Arkansas. Improving the quality of life for residents and protecting their health and safety through enforcing state and federal standards is the stated goal of Arkansas Medicaid's Office of Long Term Care. Helping those men and women get the assistance they need in a clean, safe environment in which they are treated with dignity and respect is a goal I share with the Arkansas Medicaid Program. My goal is to help Arkansans qualify for these programs as quickly and as efficiently as the law allows.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, at least 70% of Americans will need some form of long term care. And the harsh truth is that, for most of us, the only plan for paying for long-term care is Medicaid. The difficulty is that to be eligible for Medicaid, you must become "impoverished" under the program's guidelines – meaning that you must spend virtually all of the assets that you have accumulated over the course of your lifetime before you are eligible for coverage. Men and women who have worked hard all of their lives, and never taken a dime from any government program that they haven’t earned, find themselves helpless to pay for the overwhelming expense of long term care. And so they deplete their resources until they are teetering on the edge of despair because they view the depletion of their resources as a depletion of their dignity – and until they are left with little of both, the government offers no assistance.


GUARDIANSHIPS

It is all too common that children are forced to make a difficult decision: petitioning the courts for legal authority to manage their mom or dad’s life. Simply put, this is a painful decision to make because it involves coming to terms with the idea that their parent, who had always been a responsible, strong leader, now, for one painful reason or another, no longer has the mental or physical capacity to handle their daily affairs or care for their daily needs.

The comforting news is this: you don’t have to go through this process alone. It is our goal to handle guardianship cases with dignity and grace. We will attempt to make the process as easy as possible on your mom or dad. We will also attempt to heal or mediate any rifts between family members that often occur while making the decision to pursue guardianship. It is our goal to get all of a proposed ward’s loved ones on the same page, so that they can all work together to care for their needs.

Of course, if a parent has been taken advantage of by a loved one, and a guardianship is necessary to stop the abuse, then we will zealously hold the wrong doer responsible for their misuse of funds or mistreatment of the proposed ward. There is no excuse for taking advantage of an elderly loved one.