As the baby boomer segment of our population grows ever older and the average life expectancy of American citizens lengthens well beyond the most fantastic hopes of medical science just a generation or two ago, the endemic restrictions of the 1965 Social Security Act regarding state sponsored insurance have become increasingly central to the public health debate, and the associated costs of Medicaid assisted living programs in particular can no longer be ignored.

For Americans planning their retirement and hoping, in the face of newly limited household budgets and unchanging incomes, to relinquish health care costs to governmentally funded programs, the realization that Medicaid assisted living – should the men and women one day find themselves advised to enroll within a skilled nursing facility – will in all likelihood not cover the totality of the sky high costs such care will eventually accrue can come as a nasty surprise.

Senior citizens within the United States who depend upon limited financial resources will be especially prone to unstudied assumptions regarding Medicaid assisted living – believing, with an almost purposeful disregard for the shifting realities of public health coverage, that the governmental programs shall take care of their late life medical needs – and, tragically, they’ll also be the least likely to suddenly rearrange their plans should the state bureaus be unable to fund extended rests in nursing homes. 

Furthermore, men and women suffering from declining health (the biological directive which we all must one day confront) will be proportionally less likely to fully comprehend the economic parameters of Medicaid assisted living programs, and, the more that they truly need help from skilled professionals, the less patience and capacity the seniors would have to analyze their Medicaid assisted living alternatives.

With poorer seniors often forced to avoid regular preventive care and non emergency medical treatment because of a frustrating and continuing inability to come up with even the negligible amounts of money requested by the state government as part of the co-pay system, Medicaid assisted living programs that ask for a substantial portion of the costs to be the obligation of the patients themselves could be too  much for minuscule budgets.

Every American citizen and legal alien who has paid his or her taxes (or, in any event, had a spouse pay sufficiently) for the five years prior to the qualifying age of sixty five will receive some sort of health coverage from Medicare, but this program was always intended to serve more as a shield against sudden accidents or illnesses requiring expensive lab work, surgical procedures, or even the extraordinarily costly hospitalization.  Medicare simply is not equipped to handle the day to day costs of extended insurance plans in the manner of Medicaid assisted living.

At the same point, however, since each state maintains their own financial eligibility standards, it’s much more difficult for seniors to successfully join something like Medicaid assisted living, and, even if the prospective patients manage to get through the first stages of Medicaid assisted living coverage, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to keep the insurance should their personal economic situations change or the official state criteria for Medicaid assisted living guidelines themselves be raised (as has happened quite frequently throughout the past recession, to the alarm of many subscribers).

We do not mean to suggest that the Medicaid assisted living program is out of bounds for the ordinary consumer who honestly would have trouble otherwise paying for their own nursing home care – indeed, millions of Americans receive dearly needed help from the governmental service every day – but, with all aspects of state run insurance currently in such flux, men and women thinking about retiring in the not so distant future would do well to keep tabs on their local Medicaid assisted living regulations.

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