Medicaid & Long-Term Care
When faced with a long-term care crisis and the accompanying astronomical monthly costs, families often push to keep doing things the same way they always have, just better or more efficiently. They keep pushing ahead with their fingers crossed that, somehow, they can preserve enough money to pay the $10,000+/month nursing home bill and not run out of money.
It doesn’t work. They have to think differently. That is exactly what the movie Moneyball was all about. By thinking of things differently, boiling it down to the things that matter, and sifting out what doesn’t, the Oakland A’s, one of the poorest teams, were able to achieve astounding results. In his video, Jeffrey G. Marsocci, The Plain English Attorney™, analyzes some key points in the movie that align with how families and professionals should approach the Medicaid Long-Term Care Planning process.
I was watching some clips of Moneyball on YouTube and I said wait a minute, this relates to trying to get people to think differently in a way that’s going to effectively help them qualify for Medicaid without completely spending all of their money. This thinking, like in the movie, kind of lines up.
Disclaimer: This is “fair use.” It’s using the clips in an educational way. I’m not making any money off of the video. The importance is the lesson.
Setting the scene up – The first one we are going to talk about is Brad’s character sees there is a problem. They’ve got to approach things differently, they just lost and a bunch of their really good players became free agents and they are going to other teams who are paying them massive amounts of money that the Oakland A’s can’t afford to pay them.
Brad’s character is looking at the stats, the actual figures, and these other people are doing what everybody else in baseball does because they’ve got the budget to do it. Now comparing this to Medicaid, mom or dad need to go to a nursing home but they have automatically $14 – $15,000 monthly coming in so they don’t have to touch their investments so they can just keep moving forward. What looks good? What pops off the bat? What does this have to do with the stats that are going to help them win? Nothing!
When it comes to Medicaid long-term care planning this is where we need to think differently. Everyone their entire life has been trained to save money, invest money and grow money. So look for what’s going to grow. We’re not talking about that anymore.
We’re talking about immediately having a mandatory $10 to $11,000 a month get drained and sucked away. The saving part of it, the growing before retirement, that’s done. You’ve got to think about things a lot differently. So Brad’s character is trying to think differently about the problem in the movie.
Then the guys in the movie start judging a player on the aesthetics of his girlfriend. Oh yeah, bring him in he’s got attitude, etc. None of that is going to end up adding to his stats. Winning in a baseball game has nothing to do with what your girlfriend looks like. You get all this extraneous stuff.
Putting this as a problem that coincides with Medicaid; there are a lot of different investments that get pitched to people. Oh, well you can do this and then there is that. Look if it doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that you have long-term care costs that are going to be about $10,000 a month, well then what good is it?
Jeff then explains techniques from years back when estate tax limits were much, much lower. To listen to the story, please click here.