Maine Long-Term Care Planning

Maine's planning conversation starts differently than in a strict income-cap state. Its public older-adult materials describe a deductible option for anyone who qualifies medically but runs over the income or asset limits: MaineCare begins covering costs once the person has paid the deductible amount for covered services during that period. That's a meaningfully different mechanism than assuming every excess-income situation forces a Qualified Income Trust.

Underneath that deductible option sits the same core financial framework found in the Eligibility Manual: an institutionalized individual generally needs to stay under $2,000 in countable assets, while an eligible couple, or someone living with an ineligible spouse, is held to a $3,000 SSI-related standard. When one spouse is institutionalized and the other remains in the community, a separate community-spouse calculation has to be run — it isn't folded into the individual figures above.