A few weeks ago a VNS nurse came to make an assessment. After a short meeting and my explanation of the situation she entered the data into her laptop and came up with an assessment of 6 hours. I took her outside and explained the extent of my mother's memory issues and the sympathetic nurse consulted with her supervisor. She then informed me that my mother would be approved for 12 hours of daily home care! This was the first assessment that actually provided more care then we had been able to get with the long term care insurance. I signed the necessary papers.
I still wasn't sure how the John Hancock Long Term Care Insurance would interact with this VNS plan and the nurse was not sure either. She suggested I speak to someone at the office. What proceeded was numerous phone calls to VNS without any satisfactory answers until I reached the Director of Membership Development who stated that any services I wanted to add was our choice and had no influence on the 12 hours they were providing. She added a disclaimer that she thought this was the case but could be mistaken.
I followed up with staff at the home care agency and this information was confirmed and someone actually told me that this was commonly done....which makes me wonder why something so commonly done was not known by any of the 5 insurance agencies I spoke with prior to VNS, nor Medicaid staff!
I'm currently in the process of making the home care agency the payee so that my reimbursement from John Hancock is not counted as surplus income....but I'm hopeful.
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