GREAT NEWS FOR MEDI-CAL RECIPIENTS!

Wonderful news for many people who are on the Medi-Cal program.

California is very generous when qualifying low income and middle class families for Medi-Cal  benefits, but there has been a nasty underbelly to this. California has an extremely aggressive and harsh estate recovery program.

As I have explained before on this blog, under current law there is a very real problem going on where impoverished people are forced to repay the government for the cost of their healthcare with their life savings after they die— often the family home.

IS YOUR TRUST A TICKING TIME BOMB?

When the question is whether or not a trust is up to date the answer can be complicated because so much of that depends on what has changed in your life recently.  However, a huge change in the law has left ticking time bombs in the hands of many unsuspecting people and I’ve decided that it is important enough to step outside of my usual format so you can be made aware of the problem:

WHAT IS A TRUST?

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that trust is a beautiful, delicate thing.  It is built, brick by brick, interaction by interaction, into a foundation strong enough to hold higher levels of interactions in the future but, like a Jenga game, one poor decision can cause it all to come crashing down.

That’s trust and it is definitely related to what you are doing when you enter into a “trust agreement,”  but it isn’t the whole story.

But first, a little background:

YEA! I FINALLY HAVE A TRUST! AM I DONE?

According to several polls less than half of Americans have an estate plan so congratulations on getting the first step done.  Putting your affairs in order is a very loving thing for you to do for your heirs and yourself (in the case of your incapacity) and I want to encourage you to finish the job.  Hopefully you went to a qualified attorney instead of some trust mill, but either way the chances that you are done are, unfortunately, slim.  If you have a revocable living trust-based estate plan (as opposed to a will-based estate plan) then what you have paid for is a (hopefully) beautiful (hopefully) complete intention.  Acting on that intention is the next step.

SHOULD I USE ONLINE LEGAL FORMS?

I think everyone should use a qualified lawyer for every legal decision in their lives, without exception.


The idea of my dear readers walking through their day without an attorney there to point out all of the little legal potholes of life is terrifying!


However, I started this blog because I know lawyers are expensive (law school is expensive, malpractice insurance is expensive, running an office is expensive, mandatory continuing legal eduction is expensive) and you need, you deserve inexpensive access to law. (I also think you deserve inexpensive access to medicine but, really, what do I know, I’m just some liberal from California who should probably be charging more for her services.)