Financing Memory Care/Nursing Home/ALF with Medicaid

dcb5414 · January 15

Hello! First, sending a lot of compassion and energy to everyone here. For me, my mother is in the later stages of Dementia we are looking to move her into a medicaid facility where we could potentially pay for an upgrade to a single room. I am looking for resources or any discussions on financing memory care with Medicaid - best practices, things not to forget, under-utilized resources, tax breaks, etc. We have done a lot of research and have consulted an attorney to finalize Medicaid approval. But, we're missing the input of any real-life experience to make sure we are covering all of our bases.

If this is already an active discussion thread, I would be grateful for anyone who could point me in that direction. I've been searching for the past two days and haven't found it yet.

Any tips or suggested resources would be greatly most graciously welcomed. May this new year be filled with hope and support for all of us!

pamu · January 15

If you're able to pay for an upgrade to a single room, that is wonderful. My mom's memory care does not have any single Medicaid rooms available. When she first moved there (Sept 2025) her first roommate wouldn't leave her alone and had very difficult behaviors. Mom's charge nurse moved mom in with a quiet resident and so far it's been so much better. Her roommate is hardly in the room at all so it's like she has her own room. Also, her MC unit has female residents only. I have no financial advice or suggestions because mom went on Medicaid seven years ago (she had no savings or property so her case was pretty straight forward). You may want to contact your state's agency for aging or department of health to find out what other benefits she could receive (glasses, hearing aides, dental). If you haven't already, you may also want to reach out to the MC to see if they have any resources available. I can tell you probably the most important thing is to communicate with the staff often. All of the nurses, LNA's and activity staff know our whole family because we visit and chat with them during our visits. I get text updates (and photos) a couple times a week from her charge nurse even though we visit frequently. She's been a God send. So far we are very happy with her care, despite the Medicaid nursing home stigma.

H1235 · January 15

Welcome. Glad you found us. What Medicaid offers and the requirements to qualify vary by state. If you have done some research and talked with a lawyer, you probably have a good idea how things work in your state. Most states will not cover mc or Al (or only partially). Any Al that accepted Medicaid as full payment in my state was an absolute dump! I found a nice clean nursing home was a better option for us. I would keep in mind that facilities can have a waiting list and for us anyway they wanted us to file for Medicaid in the same county we were moving her to. We are rural and we had to go a ways to get a good nursing home. I assume your lawyer recommended a prepaid funeral. I think that’s a fairly typical. If you want to browse past discussions on this topic, just click in the magnifying glass in the upper right of the screen and search that way. I always wondered logistically how Medicaid worked. In my state, mom gets her normal SS and pension deposited each month in her bank account. Medicaid knows exactly how much this is. Each month a get a bill from the nursing home for the patient pay portion. She is allowed to keep $50 a month for spending money. In the nursing home almost everything is covered and provided. Thankfully that includes depends (they are so expensive). Moms expenses include a hair dresser, pop an snacks, her cell phone and any new clothing she needs. They have a hair stylist come to the building and I keep money in an account at the facility to cover this. Al or mc my require you to cover more things like toothpaste, Kleenex, laundry detergent. I hope this helps.

Financing Memory Care/Nursing Home/ALF with Medicaid

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