Hi, I’m Christopher Lavin, an attorney with the Lavin Law Group. We are an elder law firm here in Lebanon, in Ohio. And a big portion of elder law is benefits planning or long term care planning. And there’s two really main sources of benefits that our clients rely on. One is the benefits to the state, which is the Medicaid system or the benefits to the VA.
Now, there’s multiple VA programs, but there’s a very specific VA program called the Aid and Attendance Pension. Now, a lot of folks confuse this with the DIC or the disability program. You don’t have to have an injury or an ailment that’s linked back to wartime service. It simply is a service based program. So what type of service is necessary?
They want the veteran to have 90 days of continuous active duty. They want the veteran to have an honorable discharge. And a veteran has to have one day of service of that 90 days during war years. And those can be found online. We can provide them to you as well. So if that veteran meets those criteria, they’re potentially eligible.
Now for this VA program, it’s a need based program. So you have to have a medical expenses, not just extra income, and you cannot be over resources. So what type of resource eligibility is the VA looking at? They do exempt the house. They exempt approximately $130,000 worth of resources. And you have to have a medical expense to chip down on the income to get what’s called VA eligible there.
So you do need to do some planning in many cases to qualify for the program. It’s not automatic like it was so much in the past. Now, one more thing and the benefit of it is up to $2,200 a month in extra income, which goes a long way towards much long term care. The other reason we want to mention it is only one of two VA programs that extends to the spouse or the widow or the other veteran.
So please look at that and review that. Have your DV 2-14 reviewed by your advisors to see if there’s potential eligibility, even if you’re in good health because you want to make a note of it. We make a note in our file and we know it’s something we could be working towards. As things change down the road.