Medicaid Planning
Alabama Medicaid covers long-term nursing home care, but the rules — a five-year look-back on asset transfers and a spend-down to a small countable-asset limit — generally mean planning has to happen years before care is needed.
What you should know
- Medicaid eligibility in Alabama generally requires a single applicant to reduce countable assets to a small threshold. Married couples have separate rules that protect a share for the spouse at home.
- Medicaid reviews every asset transfer made in the five years before an application. Transfers within that window — including transfers into a trust — can trigger a period of ineligibility.
- A Medicaid Asset Protection Trust, properly structured and funded at least five years before care is needed, can remove qualifying assets from countable resources and from estate recovery.
- Alabama also runs a Medicaid estate recovery program, which may seek reimbursement from a recipient’s estate after death — including from the home, unless protected by advance planning.
- Even when care is already needed, crisis planning options — spousal protections, the caregiver-child exception, exempt-asset strategies — may still preserve meaningful assets.
Is now the time to start Medicaid planning?
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