Posted on 12/16/2013 7:39:27 AM PST by afraidfortherepublic
As thousands of state residents enroll in Washington’s expanded Medicaid program, many will be surprised at fine print: After you’re dead, your estate can be billed for ordinary health-care expenses. State officials are scrambling to change the rule.
It wasn’t the moonlight, holiday-season euphoria or family pressure that made Sofia Prins and Gary Balhorn, both 62, suddenly decide to get married.
It was the fine print.
As fine print is wont to do, it had buried itself in a long form — Balhorn’s application for free health insurance through the expanded state Medicaid program. As the paperwork lay on the dining-room table in Port Townsend, Prins began reading.
She was shocked: If you’re 55 or over, Medicaid can come back after you’re dead and bill your estate for ordinary health-care expenses.
The way Prins saw it, that meant health insurance via Medicaid is hardly “free” for Washington residents 55 or older. It’s a loan, one whose payback requirements aren’t well advertised. And it penalizes people who, despite having a low income, have managed to keep a home or some savings they hope to pass to heirs, Prins said.
With an estimated 223,000 adults seeking health insurance headed toward Washington’s expanded Medicaid program over the next three years, the state’s estate-recovery rules, which allow collection of nearly all medical expenses, have come under fire.
Medicaid, in keeping with federal policy, has long tapped into estates. But because most low-income adults without disabilities could not qualify for typical medical coverage through Medicaid, recovery primarily involved expenses for nursing homes and other long-term care.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.com ...
Wrong, 01 JAN 14 it goes to seven (7) years, just like IRS. THere is talk at the insurance seminar that they want a ten (10) year!!! lookback. Unfathonable. At least the IRS workers and accounting business that is supported by it will have a job when/if the IRS is abolished and a Constitutional amendment nullifies personal income tax. /hoping.
Just exactly why is this dispensation for heirs not having to pay bills, regardless of cost? So, all of us are subjected to unrealistic (I might add a situation caused by government and lawyers) costs. Why do you want to give just the Medicaid patients and their heirs a free ride. Connection of high medical costs has nothing to do with the Medicaid question wrt assets that have been hidden or not identified.
Regardless, forewarned is forearmed.
If one goes onto the ACA exchanges nod fills out the form to see what insurance is available, and it turns out that you are eligible for Medicaid, they automatically enroll you, won’t let you unenroll, and won’t let you sign up for insurance.
Cremation is even cheaper.....I plan on that. I want my ashes in the same kind of marble urn my daughter begged me to buy for the Great Dane she loved and had to put down.
I want to be up on that mantel with the dog.
It astounds me that when a sick elderly person is thrown into Medicaid at the mercy of the rest of our taxes, that dependents expect that person should be able to keep, and more importantly will over the assets to the children.
The ride is free, but you can’t keep what you squirreled away unless you do it 3 years before.
California's MediCal which is Medicaid put these rules into effect at least two decades ago.
Most, who tried to have their parents assets diverted to them, before/during/post medical treatment, that we know were shrieking liberals. They wanted their parents assets and for the rest of us to pay for their parents final care. It was comical to watch these liberals who loved every tax created, go into depression when they got taxed in spite of their criminal acts.
The funniest event was where a female tricked her mother to sign every asset over to her before her mother died. This also $crewed her siblings who got nothing. One of her siblings turned her into the various tax agencies and the local sheriff since the mother died without a will. That meant that anything left after the medical bills should have been divided equally with all of the surviving off spring. The conniving witch ended up with criminal charges that would be dropped if the left overs were divided up equally. She ended up broke after she paid off her siblings.
I believe I’d have to see actual fact on that. So much of ObamaCare now is just hype and propaganda. Further, somebody please show me a Healthcare card for 2014 that has been paid for and is a result of someone using that website.
Maybe that explains why I don’t know anything about it. I’d cancel my internet service and toss my computer in the trash before I would ever log onto an ObamaCare exchange website.
The White House has repeatedly maintained that ObamaCare expands options, a mantra that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney repeated on Friday. “They’ll have choices they didn’t have in the past, including a range of options when it comes to levels of coverage,” he said.
But those options don’t apply to the millions who will be directed to Medicaid, many of them hardly impoverished.
“The system will automatically sign them up for Medicaid, even if they don’t want to be on Medicaid,” says James Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “That’s what’s happening. So a lot of people are getting signed up for Medicaid just by virtue of what their income is.”
A case in point is a Virginia family, who asked to remain anonymous, but who came to Fox News with documents that demonstrate an apparent absurdity with Medicaid selection.
The father owns a $5 million house - entirely paid for. His kids attend expensive private schools. He owns three cars, but because he has earned his fortune and has stopped working , and his wife’s new start-up business has yet to produce an income stream, he is considered by the Healthcare.gov website to have no income.
The website put him on Medicaid. He protested in the website’s chat area. A screen grab of the dialogue reads: “Let 60 minutes show up in front of my 5 million dollars paid for house and tell America that this guy is on {Medicaid} and that the American people are paying {for} it!”
A navigator replied, “I do understand your frustration, however I have no other options to offer.”
There is also strong evidence Medicaid provides substandard care. The Manhattan Institute’s Avik Roy wrote in 2012, “Medicaid patients were almost twice as likely to die as those with private insurance; their hospital stays were 42 percent longer and cost 26 percent more.”
Medicare doesn’t cover the full amount of many things, so some get medicaid in addition to bridge the difference. You have to be dirt poor for that in NY. That may change a bit with the new health care laws, but I don’t have any info about it.
When my Grandmother-in-law went into a nursing home (unnecessary at that time, and I argued strongly against) it was still a 3 year look back in NY. She had her own money to pay for the nursing home, and owned her personal home outright. I knew that the costs of the nursing home would blow through her funds (she was in great health, but unsteady on her feet)and that the state would attach her property, so I advised my future husband to get with her and the attorney to protect it.
She paid nearly $500,000. to that nursing home over four years, and wasn’t even in the “full care” ward until the last 10 months. She had enough funds to pay for her health coverage (had it for many years, nice premiums-good coverage)and prescriptions until the end but had to sign up for MEDI-CAID to cover the costs for the FACILITY once the bulk of her money was gone. We don’t feel the least guilty for protecting the house from the costs.
The last year that nursing home payments were made from her account it cost over $12,000 per month. Not including any actual medical care at all, which the state never paid a bit of.
My MIL was pissed that there was no money left, but I had warned her over and over what would happen, and advised the family to do it much differently. My MIL made the call because she didn’t want to be bothered with it all. She was FURIOUS when she found out that the house was being given to my husband. Tough shit for her. She wanted her mother out of the way, and didn’t want any responsibility for any of the maintenance and administration of the accounts, nursing home, property, attorneys, etc. She just wanted power of attorney, and expected the house. She got neither.
here is a time limitation on how long the state has to collect....probably different in each state....I think it's 6 months in CA.
The second thing I should do is go out and try to get a 100% loan-to-value mortgage on the $5 million home. If I'm going to be stuck on Medicaid and basically subject to a future lien of an unknown amount on the property, then I might as well let the bank and Uncle Sam figure out who gets the house after I die.
when my uncle (my mother's brother) died back in 1997, his wife and her family had his body sent to the poshest cemetery in town, and then could not afford to have the services and burial there, so they wanted my mother's family (my parents and my siblings and i) to pay for the bulk of the bill... we were willing to put a significant amount of money toward my Uncle's burial and services as we loved him dearly... however, we still could not come up with all of the money... so i took it upon myself to shop around at other cemeteries, and i found one willing to do it all for half of what the posh place billed us... but when the posh place found out i had gone shopping around, and had planned to have my Uncle's body transferred to the other funeral home, the guy with whom we were working decided to give us the cheaper price!!! he didn't want to add to our grief by having us transfer my Uncle's body... oh please!!! what a rip off... because of this experience, i have decided it would be fine with being cremated... sheesh...
If you are poor you can be Medi/Medi, Medicare and Medicaid. My mom had nothing coming in but my dad’s social security and could not afford a Medicare gap policy so she qualified for Medi/Medi.
Actually there are a fair number of articles on it from a variety of news services. See post 90 for one I happened to capture.
This Obamacare won't give you that option. They'll track everything you have from day 1.
If the wife runs a flower shop, then buy a dozen roses every 15 minutes if necessary. If she runs a small bake shop, then buy a dozen cookie platters every day. The couple's circumstances won't really change at all, but the ObamaCare website will suddenly recognize them as "wealthy."
It’s a tough lesson to learn, but the simple truth is that when it comes to finances, the world is really just too complicated for a lot of people to understand.
We just went through a 2 1/2 yr probate suit over more or less the same thing. Sis in law took hubby’s poor old dad who had dementia down and had his lawyer rewrite the trust to put her (instead of hubby) in charge of everything. When his dementia got worse she threw him in an alzheimers home and stole every dime of his money, about $500k. It is amazing to me what people will do for money.
Of course you have no problem with gov taking 60 to 70% of my income/wealth to be used to support things you like and benefit from but by golly there is hell to pay if poor people try to hang on to what little crumbs gov did not get at tax time. Take off the blinders. Some day, maybe soon, gov will be coming for your stuff too.
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