| Increases in income can change Medicaid budgeting…
CLIENT QUESTION:
Will increases in Social Security affect the POOLED TRUST deposit amount for Medicaid?
MY RESPONSE:
Let me explain what this client is asking in simple terms. If you are on Community Medicaid (Medicaid is paying for home care), then you get to keep the first $954 ($1583 in 2023) of your income and the excess can be protected by paying it into a POOLED TRUST maintained by a not-for-profit. Thereafter you can submit bills to the POOLED TRUST and the trust will pay them. The net result is that you get to keep some or all of your income. The amount you will be paying to the trust is budgeted by Medicaid and doesn’t really get re-budgeted until your Medicaid is recertified, supposedly once a year.
In theory, if your income goes up (because your Social Security went up or otherwise) after you are budgeted, you should increase the amount you pay to the POOLED TRUST. As a lawyer, this is what I recommend. In the real world, some people wait until they are re-budgeted to get the right number to pay to the trust. Since COVID began, re-budgeting has been suspended until some time in the future. In the past, re-budgeting has not affected increased income more than six months predating the re-certification. Does this mean that your increase in income will only change things when re-budgeting returns, and then only for the prior six months? Maybe.
So the answer to the client’s question is YES…at some point, in some amount…but the advice you will get from me today is to do the right thing! 😊 |
