Mississippi State Veterans Home Daily Charge Exemption at 70%

A resident of a Mississippi State Veterans Nursing Home pays no daily charge if any of three conditions is met: the resident is in need of nursing home care for a VA adjudicated service-connected disability; or has a singular or combined service-connected rating of 70 percent or more based on one or more service-connected disabilities and needs nursing home care; or has a total rating of 100 percent based on individual unemployability and needs nursing home care. That 70 percent floor is the lowest threshold for free state long-term care in this catalog, and it is the most valuable thing Mississippi does for a veteran who is not at 100 percent. Skilled nursing in Mississippi runs into the thousands of dollars a month. This waives the resident's daily charge completely rather than discounting it. Note where the rule lives, because it explains why it is so easy to miss. The exemption is not in the Mississippi Code. It is in the Mississippi Administrative Code, Title 25, Part 102, Chapter 4, Rule 4.6, which is titled "Seventy Percent (70%) Service Connected Veterans." The statute at Miss. Code Ann. Section 35-1-27 only tells the State Veterans Affairs Board to set rates within the patient's ability to pay. A search of the statutes turns up nothing; the board's own rules carry the benefit. Mississippi Veterans Affairs does print it in the benefit guidebook, under the heading "State Veterans Nursing Home Daily Charge Exemption." Individual unemployability is named explicitly here, which is not true of Mississippi's other big benefits. The homestead exemption and the hunting and fishing exemption both use "service-connected total disability" without saying whether unemployability satisfies it. This rule says a total rating based on individual unemployability qualifies, in so many words. A veteran paid at 100 percent through unemployability should expect a clean answer at the nursing home and a murky one at the tax assessor. The first path deserves its own sentence because it has no percentage in it. A veteran whom VA has adjudicated as needing nursing home care for a service-connected disability pays nothing, whatever the combined rating. The rating filter in this catalog cannot test that condition, so the entry is gated at 70 percent. A veteran below 70 percent who has that VA adjudication should still ask. The same rating language governs two bed-hold rules, which decide whether you keep paying while the resident is not in the building. A qualifying veteran gets 10 free days of bed hold for a hospitalization, and the first 12 days of voluntary pass in a calendar year at no charge. For a family taking a resident home for the holidays, or dealing with a hospital stay, that is the difference between a bill and no bill. The exemption covers the daily charge for nursing care, laundry, room, and board. It does not cover physician services, podiatry, specialized rehabilitation, or specialty beds, which remain the resident's responsibility.