What is Florida Medicaid Waiver Program?

What is Florida Medicaid Waiver Program? This Florida Medicaid waiver is designed to help the elderly and permanently disabled adults. It is intended specifically to allow persons at risk for nursing home placement to remain living in their homes or in the homes of their caregivers and to receive assistance in those locations.

Attorney Tom Olsen: Kay, you're on News 96.5, go ahead.

Kay: Yes. Hi, I have a mother who is disabled. She is currently a kind of a strange situation. She's on Medicare and Medicaid.

Attorney Tom Olsen: All right.

Kay: She's on a program where we try to keep her out of a nursing home. My question is, she's currently-- before my dad passed, they did a trust for their property. I just wanted to know if it comes to a point that she has to be put in a nursing home, would that still be the best thing to do is to put that in a trust?

Attorney Tom Olsen: Kay, did you say it's your mom or mother in law?

Kay: My mother.

Attorney Tom Olsen: Okay. She's on a Medicaid waiver where the Medicaid is sending in some in-home care for her?

Kay: Right, yes. Right now, she gets 12 hours a week.

Attorney Tom Olsen: This is the first thing I want to let people know is that Medicaid is a government agency that will pay for somebody's nursing home or in-home care if you can't afford it. People think of Medicaid strictly as for nursing homes, but Medicaid under certain circumstances, will send in-home care to you. Now, Kay, the good news is that in all situations here in the state of Florida, where you're on Medicaid, where the government is paying for your nursing home or your in-home care, you get to keep your home. Her home is not at risk. They will not take her home, and her home will pass to her children when she passes away free from nursing home or Medicaid claims. Is that your only concern, Kay?

Kay: Well, yes. Two, the fact that when she signed up for the program and got it, it was after my dad passed a little over a year or so ago. We feel she needs more hours, but yet, we don't want to push the situation because we don't want them to say we're taking her off of it.

Attorney Tom Olsen: No, no, no. Kay, we have the best Medicaid planning team in Florida in my humble opinion at the Olsen Law Group in Orlando. For all the listeners out there, what we're talking about is a Medicaid waiver. Medicaid is trying to save money and send in-home care rather than send her to a nursing home. When you're going to talk to somebody about this program, call it the waiver program. Kay, if you want to get your mom more hours, it would start by calling Olsen Law Group in Orlando. You would talk to an attorney in our office by the name of Robert and Robert would assist you with that.