Can Medicare be used for long-term care in New York?

by | Jan 14, 2015 | Long-Term Care Planning |

When doing your long-term care planning in New York, you need to know exactly where you are going to get your funding from. This naturally leads you to the question of whether or not you can use Medicare to cover these costs.

Typically speaking, the answer is simple: No, Medicare does not work for long-term care options. There are exceptions and certain things that will be covered, but you should expect to have to cover most of the costs in another fashion.

For example, Medicare will often help to pay for treatment if it can be shown that you need daily treatment for a specific reason. For example, you may have had surgery, so you need to see a professional every day to make sure that you are healing properly. Even in these cases, though, the care usually only lasts for 100 days. If you don’t need that daily care for a specific reason, you are likely not going to get just general coverage to pay for you to live in a nursing home.

In short, Medicare is more about helping you with specific medical treatments or helping you recover, and not about assisting with your overall living situation.

This is crucial because an assisted living center can be quite expensive. Reports show that you could pay around $81,030 if you do not even have a private room, with that price jumping up to $90,520 if you do. That is not the overall cost, either, but the cost per year.

Make sure that you know what to do about long-term care, from setting it up to paying for it.

Source: Forbes, “Does Medicare Pay For Long-Term Care?” accessed Jan. 14, 2015