Today’s Special

Waiver Woes

Alex, being forever autistic, has a Medicaid waiver, which opens the door to funding for a variety of services, from dental insurance to payment for recreation camps and activities. The social services people, however, keep sending us the wrong forms year after year. We dutifully fill them out, his waiver gets axed, and Jill has to go stand in line in an office neither of us ever dreamed she’d see the inside of. Here’s how we intend to attack this problem, and tips for special-needs parents wrangling in their own version of this growing problem.

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In a perfect world, parents of autistic kids would have every need met. But Jill and Jeff don’t live in a perfect world, and in this cast they talk about what they’d like to see available for services to autistic kids and their families, with ideas — playgrounds, insurance, rec programs, tax breaks — ranging from the fantastic to the commonsense.

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Inheritance versus trust. Pooled versus private. Grantors versus trustees. Payouts and benefits cutoffs and “testamentary” and “inter vivos” and what does all this mean when you’re just trying to have a life with a special-needs child!? The nuts and bolts of establishing a special needs trust for your loved one’s future can be befuddling, and in this session we look at some of the terms they’ve learned in setting up a trust for Alex. We also provide many print and Web-based sources for more information.

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Few issues come with more emotional freight than whether to create a special-needs trust — monies put aside for your disabled child’s adulthood, when a parent is no longer around. We’re wrestling with the many, many, many pros, cons, and details of creating such a trust for Alex. In this first podcast discussing trusts, we talk about how we feel that such a fund may well be necessary for his future.

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