Success getting healthcare coverage for immigrant parents over 65

[SusieQQQ 11,586]

7 hours ago, Umka36 said:

It's really about how to get/claim the PTC in the end as getting health care coverage isn't the issue.

This is why it is in the administration’s sights to go into the revised public charge definition. 

[rkodali 0]

Hi 

I read through this discussion. My mother just arrived few months back her AOS is pending and I am in the process of seeing whether she is eligible for healthcare? If so Can i just show her income as few hundreed dollars that is her pension back from India? And not claim her as my dependent on my taxes and keep filing her taxes alone? 

[missads 59]

Hi all, been a while since I posted on this thread. I need some help.

Has anyone recently applied for Medi-Cal in California for parents on green cards (zero income)? Were they approved? Please share...

[databit 328]

On 2/5/2019 at 10:06 AM, missads said:

Hi all, been a while since I posted on this thread. I need some help.

Has anyone recently applied for Medi-Cal in California for parents on green cards (zero income)? Were they approved? Please share...

Did they file their taxes for 2018 yet on their own (not as being deducted on your taxes)? Do that first. 

[missads 59]

On 2/6/2019 at 3:02 PM, databit said:

Did they file their taxes for 2018 yet on their own (not as being deducted on your taxes)? Do that first. 

They will, they have filed their taxes separately every year thus far.

 

I am trying to find out if there's been any changes to Medi-cal eligibility rules recently. I hear applications from elderly immigrants with no income who have a green card sponsored by their children aren't being approved like they used to be in the past.

[Dellgra 0]

We are currently going through the immigration process (almost finished the first stage.) I am using the Healthcare.gov website to get arrange health insurance. We have an Armed Forces, Police, and two UK State pensions. Are all of these regarded as income or just the Armed Forces and Police pensions? And do I submit the gross or net figure as they are taxed automatically in the UK before I receive them?

[Boiler 44,986]

3 minutes ago, Dellgra said:

We are currently going through the immigration process (almost finished the first stage.) I am using the Healthcare.gov website to get arrange health insurance. We have an Armed Forces, Police, and two UK State pensions. Are all of these regarded as income or just the Armed Forces and Police pensions? And do I submit the gross or net figure as they are taxed automatically in the UK before I receive them?

They are all income, but your tax situation will need professional advice as essentially the US taxes you on your world wide income.

[Dellgra 0]

2 minutes ago, Boiler said:

They are all income, but your tax situation will need professional advice as essentially the US taxes you on your world wide income.

Thank you.

[frazzled daughter 1]

I know this is a few years on, but I'm desperately trying to make my mother's immigration to the US work. She is almost 80 and recently became unable to continue living where she was in the UK. So basically  found herself unexpectedly homeless and unable to live by herself. I brought her over to the US to spend the holidays with us and after trying to research all this, convinced her to apply for a change of status to LPR. She just received her I-7697C receipt. We applied for a plan for her on the marketplace. We are being told by two separate help line people at healthcare.gov that she doesn't get any subsidies because we didn't enter her social security number. As far as I'm aware, she can't obtain a SS number yet, because she is only beginning the immigration process? However, paying the full premiums is almost twice her monthly income right now. 

 

Is it a fact that she needs a social security number to qualify for tax subsidies/advance credits? I don't see this mentioned anywhere else. And is it true she doesn't get a SS number until she moves to the next stage of the immigration process?

 

Racing against time, here, because she is dependent on many life-saving prescription drugs. She will run out of those in March. She would have to enroll in a plan by Wednesday (two days) to get US health coverage, but it looks like doing so would be prohibitively expensive (two to three of her drugs are not covered by the plan and are super expensive anyway).  All her medical care was free in the UK, and also excellent. Without ongoing care she will undoubtedly die. I don't know whether to just let her go back and hope social services can put her up in a home in the uk where at least she will stay alive, if lonely, or to bankrupt us all by trying to keep her here with her family.

 

Suggestions?

 

Thanks. 

[TBoneTX 44,868]

37 minutes ago, frazzled daughter said:

her medical care was free in the UK, and also excellent [...] let her go back and hope social services can put her up in a home in the uk where at least she will stay alive

Rather than trying to swim upstream here, consider the above.  "Free and excellent" beats the alternative.  Sincere best wishes.

[frazzled daughter 1]

21 hours ago, frazzled daughter said:

I know this is a few years on, but I'm desperately trying to make my mother's immigration to the US work. She is almost 80 and recently became unable to continue living where she was in the UK. So basically  found herself unexpectedly homeless and unable to live by herself. I brought her over to the US to spend the holidays with us and after trying to research all this, convinced her to apply for a change of status to LPR. She just received her I-7697C receipt. We applied for a plan for her on the marketplace. We are being told by two separate help line people at healthcare.gov that she doesn't get any subsidies because we didn't enter her social security number. As far as I'm aware, she can't obtain a SS number yet, because she is only beginning the immigration process? However, paying the full premiums is almost twice her monthly income right now. 

 

Is it a fact that she needs a social security number to qualify for tax subsidies/advance credits? I don't see this mentioned anywhere else. And is it true she doesn't get a SS number until she moves to the next stage of the immigration process?

 

Racing against time, here, because she is dependent on many life-saving prescription drugs. She will run out of those in March. She would have to enroll in a plan by Wednesday (two days) to get US health coverage, but it looks like doing so would be prohibitively expensive (two to three of her drugs are not covered by the plan and are super expensive anyway).  All her medical care was free in the UK, and also excellent. Without ongoing care she will undoubtedly die. I don't know whether to just let her go back and hope social services can put her up in a home in the uk where at least she will stay alive, if lonely, or to bankrupt us all by trying to keep her here with her family.

 

Suggestions?

 

Thanks. 

Great news! I managed to get this finally resolved - in thanks, in part to reading about a thousand posts on this site as well as elsewhere online. 

 

We had a fruitless trip to the Social Security Office today, who told us that we don't yet have the documentation they would need to furnish my mother with a SSN (healthcare.gov hotline folks insisted that all we needed was to take their letter to prove why we needed it etc).  These same folks insisted on two separate occasions that the reason our application was not going through as expected was because of a lack of a SSN. This turns out to be completely untrue. I had combed the internet for any type of support for this position and found none. I also pointed out to these agents that at no time did the healthcare.gov system indicate that we were lacking a SSN even though it identified other items it thought were missing. 

 

I read on this site that someone suggested that when asked to upload supporting documents to healthcare.gov it was not enough to do it once, twice, or even several times. You have to keep doing it until it actually gets through (and no, it isn't enough for it to acknowledge that your upload worked - because it can still lose track of it no matter what confirmation it initially provides). So I ended up calling one more times to ask whether they had a record of receiving the three-times uploaded proof of immigration status document. They said that they had, but that it might take 90 or so days to review. I explained that I needed to know now if the document provided them with the information they required, or if it was not deemed suitable for this purpose (at the moment, my mom only has a I-179C notice of receipt, not a 1-179A which I thinks indicates successful acceptance of the petition? Anyway, I wasn't sure if that "C" at the end made a difference since it only signifies receipt, not status granted. And healthcare.gov only asks for an 1-179 (with no letter specified). 

 

Also, instead of contacting the people who assist with enrollment and application issues, I asked to talk to those who help with tax questions. I asked to speak with the supervisor in that department and explained everything that I wrote above and more, saying that we only have until March to figure out if this is going to be feasible in terms of my mother's medical access. If she has to pay three times her annual income to have health insurance in this country then we have to get her back to the UK in the middle of March. We don't have 90 days to wait to see if she is eligible to access affordable health care. If she can't, then she has to abandon her petition to immigrate to the US.

 

So at that point the supervisor went through her application with me, again. I went through this application on the phone with two other agents previously - the ones who kept pushing the SSN issue and insisting this was the root cause of all our problems. This third time, the supervisor discovered that, despite our answering the questions about not wanting to send my mother's details for review by the Medicaid/Medicare folks in our state, and despite receiving a letter to say that they acknowledged that she didn't qualify for medicaid/care due to her immigrant status; and despite me manually instructing her profile not to send this information on to them -despite all this, the system had insisted that she needed to be reviewed by medicaid and medicare in our state before proceeding. Again, there was absolutely no indication that this was an underlying problem in her application. Once the supervisor overrode this on her end, then everything went to plan - she was suddenly eligible for tax credits as we estimated when we first looked at her options for this. She did say I had to upload her immigration status yet again (this would be time number 4!!!) and also provide proof of income before May 6, but other than that, she appears to be able to purchase health care that is truly affordable. 

 

So I know that we are not out of the woods yet - she still has a long and winding way ahead of her before we know whether all this will work out. But even if she is ultimately denied the ability to stay here, at least we have bought some time to spend together. If she had to return to the UK, I'm not sure she would have ever made it back to the US and she would live her final days mostly alone with perhaps a few visits from me whenever I can get away from work and family responsibilities. And that's all assuming I could figure out a place for her to live and the support she needs. 

 

So I just wanted to encourage others that there is a way forward as long as you understand and meet the requirements, and most importantly, don't stop when someone tells you something that doesn't seem to add up or make sense. My advice is to spend hours and hours researching this and  keep pushing forward until you have exhausted every possibility of help or different approach. The healthcare.gov is like the Wild West - unchartered and badly understood territory. I'm sure people will eventually know what they are doing and talking about there, but there's still a way to go regarding immigrants and how they fit into that particular system.

 

Hope our story helps someone else.

[Boiler 44,986]

There are lots of variables and one and I know State matters, some do allow Medicaid from Day 1, and of course income.

 

I am no expert but with OCare and using the Exchange it is of course a tax credit and with little income wonder what the impact of that would be.

 

Please do keep us updated.

[missads 59]

11 hours ago, frazzled daughter said:

Great news! I managed to get this finally resolved - in thanks, in part to reading about a thousand posts on this site as well as elsewhere online.

...

Hope our story helps someone else.

Thanks for sharing your story and congratulations on finding your mother affordable health insurance. Every bit of extra information helps, and your experience of getting healthcare without an SSN will help other readers.

Just out of curiosity, what state are you applying from?

Edited February 13, 2019 by missads

[frazzled daughter 1]

32 minutes ago, missads said:

 

Just out of curiosity, what state are you applying from?

Maine

[DolnaM 0]

On 12/7/2018 at 3:00 PM, rkodali said:

Hi 

I read through this discussion. My mother just arrived few months back her AOS is pending and I am in the process of seeing whether she is eligible for healthcare? If so Can i just show her income as few hundreed dollars that is her pension back from India? And not claim her as my dependent on my taxes and keep filing her taxes alone? 

I am at a similar stage - i-130 got approved. Before I get them all hyped up I want to see if I am going to be able to afford healthcare for them. While they are alone where they are at right now, and in a few years its going to get unsustainable to stay alone (76 and 81 now) I don't want to move them if the burden of the insurance is going to be as such that I am not able to afford it for them. Also, I don't want to find myself in a situation where i pay insurance and it ends up not covering anything. They will be filing taxes separately. I read through the thread and the original poster's story goes back to a few years. I am looking for more recent experiences from those of you out there on success/failure in situations where you brought over elderly parents to support them here.

Also, anyone can explain what it really means for a green card holder over 65 when Medicare is expanded in a state? I am in PA.