Weird, this thread was locked, i had to unlock it ? wonder if i clicked the lock button by accident.
Nyhoo, here is the state going after dead folks homes for medical bills:
"her mother started showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease. For a while, one of Tawanda’s brothers cared for Edna, but he was sick himself and died in 2004. A guardian of the state admitted Edna into a nursing home and signed her up for the state’s Medicaid program, MassHealth. Tawanda was relieved that her mother was being cared for while she was busy arranging her brother’s funeral. But when she arrived in Boston from Brooklyn, where she and her husband had settled, she heard rumors about MassHealth “robbing people of their homes” as reimbursement for their medical bills."
"A representative for MassHealth told her not to worry: If she took her mother out of the nursing home, the agency would remove the lien and her mother could continue to receive Medicaid benefits."
" the end of 2009, when Edna died, at home, in Oliver’s arms. Afterward, Tawanda received a letter from the Massachusetts Office of Health and Human Services, which oversees MassHealth, notifying her that the state was seeking “reimbursement from [Edna’s] estate for Medicaid payments made on her behalf.” For Edna’s five years on MassHealth, she owed $198,660.26."
"Tawanda’s hair started falling out soon after. She and Oliver, who was in the final stages of Alzheimer’s, had no savings and no jobs. “I said to myself, I don’t care what they do to me. I can take care of myself,” she told me. “But I couldn’t have my dying husband thrown out into the street.”"
"She and Oliver had a combined monthly income of just $1,400, well below the threshold to claim financial hardship, and she had taken care of her mother at home for more than five years. But Tawanda told me the state rejected her requests for both exceptions"
" “what they didn’t tell me then was that they had the right to reinstate” the claim on the property after her mother’s death. "
"Bill Clinton signed the Medicaid Estate Recovery Program into law as part of his deficit-reduction act in 1993. Previously, states had the right to seek repayment for Medicaid debts; the new law made it mandatory."
" the overwhelming majority of estates are not worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 2005, the Public Policy Institute of the AARP published a study of the first decade of mandatory estate recovery. Massachusetts, it found, recovered an average of $16,442 per estate in 2003, in total offsetting a little more than 1 percent of its long-term-care costs that year. That made its efforts among the most effective in the nation. In Kentucky, by contrast, the average amount collected from an estate was $93; the state recovered just 0.25 percent of its long-term-care costs."
“It’s a terrible program, it’s a punitive program, and it doesn’t do anything to reimburse the billions of dollars spent,” she told me. “The purpose of recovery was to support Medicaid and bring money back, but how? By collecting anything from the poorest of the poor? It’s ridiculous.”
“It says I owe the state of Kansas a half million dollars or they’re going to take my home.”
"the state can collect his house and land, worth an estimated $40,000, to put toward his wife’s debt."
" If my mother stays on Medicaid, the state will almost certainly take our house when she dies; if she transfers it to my or my brother’s name, her Medicaid benefits will be suspended. Unable to afford other insurance options, and unable to go without insurance as a cancer survivor, she has no choice but to remain on the government program."
"it’s possible to protect your assets by putting them into an irrevocable trust or transferring a deed to a family member before you reach retirement age."
" The mortgage-interest deduction alone—a set of housing subsidies that primarily benefits Americans in the top 20 percent of the income distribution—cost the federal government $66 billion in 2017. By comparison, letting every family of a Medicaid recipient keep their property would cost just $500 million, according to 2011 data "
" a 56-year-old secretary in Nashville, told me she’ll be homeless when the state forecloses on the house she’s been living in for the past eight years to collect on her late mother’s $171,000 Medicaid debt. "
" “No, we’re not able to reduce the bill,” she said was the state’s response. “Go live on the street, live in a box under the bridge. We don’t care; we want our money.” "
"for the first time in her life, Tawanda Rhodes didn’t vote. When Election Day came she pulled up in front of the polling station and sat there for a minute, then drove off. “It did not make me feel good,” she said. “But I felt like, Vote for what? No one cares about me.” "
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/when-medicaid-takes-everything-you-own/596671/sidd