When an ill or older relative needs help with daily activities and personal care, selecting an at-home caregiver can be a worrisome task. Who will provide care? How will they be compensated? What if the older relative needs not just occasional, but full-time care? To alleviate these concerns, a growing number of adult children are becoming caregivers for aging parents.
Although many adult children or grandchildren feel a strong sense of duty to provide care for their loved one, being a caregiver can be extremely time consuming. Providing care to an aging parent may make it difficult for the caregiver to meet other commitments, and may even result in sacrificing employment in order to provide the necessary care.
While many individuals are willing to voluntarily care for a loved one without any promise of compensation, a growing number of families are entering into Caregiver Contracts. A Caregiver Contract is a formal agreement among family members to compensate a person providing care.
A Caregiver Contract has several advantages. In addition to providing financial resources to the family member doing the work, particularly where the caregiver has given up other employment, it assures other family members that caregiving is fairly compensated and describes the care and personal services that are expected in return for a specific amount of compensation. This can alleviate family concerns over who will provide care and how much money will change hands, as well as avoid potential misunderstandings over the loved one’s reduction in assets (and the amount of money that would otherwise be inherited upon death).
Such contracts are also a key part of Medicaid planning, helping to spend down savings so that the recipient of care might more easily be able to qualify for Medicaid benefits. More importantly, without a Caregiver Contract, payments made to a family member for providing care will be considered a “divestment” for Medicaid eligibility, resulting in an ineligibility period. While payments to unrelated third parties for caregiving and personal services are not divestments, caregiving provided by a relative is considered gratuitous absent a contract that meets certain requirements.
Under the Medicaid rules, all payments to relatives for care and services made within five years of an application for Medicaid will be considered a divestment, unless all of the following are true:
• The services directly benefited the individual applying for benefits.
• The payment did not exceed reasonable compensation (prevailing local market rate) for the services provided.
• If the total payment made to the family member is greater than ten percent (10%) of Medicaid’s Community Spouse Resource Allowance, the institutionalized person must have a written, notarized agreement with the relative. (This threshold will range from $5,000 – $11,922).
• The agreement must specify the services and the amount to be paid and exist prior to the time any services are provided.
In addition to the requirements under the Medicaid rules, a properly drafted Caregiver Contract should contain provisions regarding the type of care, location of the care, terms and frequency of compensation, length of the agreement, income tax reporting issues and provisions for modification or termination. Contracts, even with family members, are legal documents. It is important to get your attorney’s help in drafting the contract to avoid omitting important terms, to provide proper documentation, and to seek advice about qualifying for Medicaid in the future.
