How are you going to pay for home health care when you or your spouse find yourselves in a situation where one of you might be draining all the assets because of a catastrophic health care incident? Or where someone’s in a situation where they don’t want to come out of their home?
Benefits of Home Care
Being cared for in the home is certainly less dramatic. It also allows you to keep your dignity, staying in the home you’ve worked hard for your entire life. That’s what we’re about: trying to help people preserve their hard earned money and property – and keep their dignity in the process.
There are direct health benefits of staying at home. Less confusion, because it’s in an environment that you’re familiar with. Less infections, because there’s only one or two people in the home. Statistics demonstrate that people recuperate at home better than they do in an institutional setting.
Even just the peace of mind. All of us, if we have a choice, would rather be at home. Most of the time you don’t find people saying, “Please take me out of my home and put me in an institution somewhere.”
There are financial benefits as well. But health care in general costs money. Unless you have really planned for this with long term care insurance – which is not the norm – then you can quickly exhaust your other liquid assets paying for health care, especially as you age.
That’s where Medicare and Medicaid come in, whether separately or working in combination.
The Difference Between Medicare and Medicaid
How do those differ?
They are totally separate programs, Medicare and Medicaid: when they apply, how long Medicare lasts, and when it runs out and Medicaid can come in and take over.
Medicare is basically a health benefit for people who are typically over 65 years of age. If you’re younger than 65 and you have a disability that lasts longer than 2 years, you can qualify for Medicare prior to age 65. Also, with end-stage renal disease, you can get Medicare benefits very quickly and very early on.
Medicaid is really a program designed for the indigent, for those who don’t have the financial means to care for themselves. Carved out of that is a health care program, and typically they fall under Medicaid waivers.
How Medicaid Can Help You
In North Carolina, we have two Medicaid waiver programs for personal care services. That’s going to be assistance in your activities for daily living – bathing, dressing, ambulating, eating, mobility, transferring, and things of that nature.
One is called Personal Care Services or PCS, which you need a doctor’s order for. Typically, in that service, you can get up to 80 hours of services per month, which works out to be about 18 hours a week. Just this year, North Carolina legislator passed a law that allows an additional 40 hours for those with dementia, for a total of 120.
The second program is the CAPDA program. With your activities in daily living, you’re typically going to get upwards of about 36 hours a week, which is more than PCS.
With both of those programs, you’ll have to qualify for Medicaid, whether you’ve already gone through the process or still need to apply. The PCS program can take a couple of months to get on. A couple of years ago, each county was capped out of the number of slots that they had for the CAPDA program.
Then, we have one other Medicaid waiver program, which is private duty nursing and is for RNs and LPNs to take care of people in the home who have catastrophic needs. They need either a tracheostomy and/or a ventilator – pretty high-tech nursing needs.
How Medicare Can Help You
The Medicare side of it is really a totally different program. If you’ve had a qualifying hospital stay, you’ve got to be getting better. But the real advantage to a Medicare program – when you have home health – is that you’re going to get up to a 60 day spell of illness.
It’s called an “intermittent spell of illness”, and that’s going to be paid 100% under your Part A Medicare. You might get nursing services, a physical therapist or occupational therapist, speech language pathologist, or a home health aid that comes and assists with bathing. And that’s going to last for 60 days.
Now, there are times when they can be recertified for an additional 60 days, but it usually caps out at that 60-day period.
When You Need Both
There are programs where Medicare and Medicaid can overlap at the same time. Then there are people that have finished their Medicare service and still need additional services after that. That could be through Medicaid, private pay, or long term care insurance.
And obviously there aren’t the stringent qualification requirements for Medicare like there are for Medicaid. One of the beauties of the Medicare benefit for home health is that it’s paid at 100%. For those individuals who qualify for that, it’s a great program for them.
The Importance of Planning Ahead
One of the most heartbreaking calls that I get is from the people that fall in that gap. They’re over-resourced for Medicaid, and they’re under-resourced to pay for it privately. Perhaps their income level doesn’t allow them to roll over and let Medicaid pay for it. It’s a hard place.
That’s why it’s important to plan ahead and make sure you’re prepared, whether it’s an emergency situation or simply old age.
