This stipulation/rule/whatever you want to call it is NOT a byproduct of Expanded Medicare. It has been there for decades IIRC.
People think when you get ‘benefits’ from the government that means you are free and clear. No way. You have to pay what you should, if you have the resources. Read the fine print.
Medicare should be Medicaid.
Most of the Obama supporters don’t worry about this because there typically isn’t anything to take.
Yes, Medicaid is a welfare program, for the poor. If you’re not poor, but rather hiding assets and taking the benefits, and then your estate turns out to have money in it after all, the government claws that back.
Those are the rules of the game, hardly fine print and absolutely not new. If you depend on the government’s benefits, you play by the government’s rules.
This isn’t really new. In order to get into a nursing home on even Medicare you have to basically go through every dime you have before it kicks in. That includes equity in real estate.
“This stipulation/rule/whatever you want to call it is NOT a byproduct of Expanded Medicare. It has been there for decades IIRC.”
And that’s the problem. Before obamacare, medicaid had an asset qualifier, which meant there would essentially be no estate upon death.
But obamcare now looks ONLY at income, so there could be quite a large estate that the government confiscates at the time of death. And the really bad part is that obamacare essentially FORCES people onto to Medicaid (which is some of the worst insurance in the world) whether they want to or not.