Law Office of Donald D. Vanarelli Blog

A New York appeals court allowed a case for legal malpractice and breach of fiduciary duty to proceed against an attorney who charged more than $44,000 for Medicaid planning work to protect a net estate valued at about $130,000. Sobel v. Ansanelli, (N.Y. Sup. Ct., App. Div., 2nd Dept., No. 2011-11418, Sept. 19, 2012). In [...]

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The Director of New Jersey Medicaid recently decided that, when a couple is institutionalized, the resources of the couple are not combined when determining Medicaid eligibility. Rather, the resources of each spouse must be considered separately.  Therefore, when only one spouse applies for Medicaid benefits and that spuse’s resources alone do not exceed the resource [...]

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A.D., a retired physician, began residing at Bergen Regional Medical Center (Bergen Regional), a nursing home, in October 2004. She was 80 years old at the time. She began receiving Medicaid benefits in late 2004. In 2006, the Bergen County Board of Social Services (Board) discovered two Keogh accounts at Citibank in A.D.’s name valued [...]

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A North Carolina appeals court recently held that assets owned by an incompetent Medicaid recipient which were discovered by her family after she had been receiving Medicaid benefits for several years were countable and that the family must repay the benefits already paid on the Medicaid recipient’s behalf. Ella Mae Cloninger suffered from Alzheimer’s disease [...]

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In what may be considered a victory of judicial deference over equity, this week our Appellate Division affirmed Medicaid’s denial of eligibility to an incapacitated applicant, based on the applicant’s ownership of assets that she was not aware she owned. In W.B. v. Division of Medical Assistance and Health Services (“DMAHS”), No. A-5658-07T1 (N.J. App. [...]

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2009 was an exciting year of litigation in the elder and disability law arena, producing a bumper crop of significant decisions from the administrative forum, as well as state and federal courts. In stark contrast with years past, New Jersey lawyers are now in the forefront of the effort to expand legal protections to greater [...]

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(The A.N. case, described below, was decided on administrative appeal in 2007 and affirmed the denial of Medicaid benefits. I represented the Medicaid applicant, A.N. You may ask why I would resurrect an administrative decision more than 2 year old which I lost. It’s a legitimate question. The answer is that I believe the case will [...]

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In order to qualify for Medicaid benefits, applicants cannot possess assets which exceed the financial limits established in the program. In order to prevent applicants from wrongly achieving Medicaid eligibility by transferring their excess resources to others, Congress has established rules which impose a “transfer penalty”, or period of ineligibility for Medicaid benefits, whenever an [...]

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In June 2009, plaintiff, Daisy Jeanne Prall, applied for nursing home Medicaid benefits with the Ocean County Board of Social Services. To be eligible for Medicaid, plaintiff and her spouse, Christopher Prall, cannot own resources which exceed $111,560; $109,560 is the community spouse resource allowance and $2,000 is the institutionalized spouse resource allowance. Although the [...]

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It is not uncommon for an elderly or disabled person to entrust his or her finances to a third party. For example, an elder may execute a power of attorney as a simple estate planning tool in order to ensure that his or her affairs are properly handled in the event that the elder is [...]

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