Many nursing home residents enter under a “Medicaid Pending” status meaning they do not have the funds to pay privately. A Medicaid application is filed after admission, and it must contain five years of detailed financial statements. The facility receives no payments until the application is approved, which can take six months.
Medicaid is a means tested program that requires proof that an applicant has no more than $14,500 of resources. Medicaid is suspicious that funds may have been given away to meet the resource level, so it looks over the records of the five-year period preceding the application to detect any such transfers. If such a transfer is discovered, the Medicaid application will be denied.
