As a New Jersey elder law attorney, people sometimes ask me, will Medicaid take my house if I need a nursing home? But there’s often a lot of misconceptions around this question.
So let’s back up a bit. If you need a nursing home, assisted living facility or other long term care, it’s incredibly expensive, often over $10,000 per month. Medicaid is a government health insurance program that can pay for a nursing home and other long term care, but Medicaid has strict eligibility requirements.
In general, Medicaid doesn’t take your house, or anything else from you, with one exception that I’ll talk about later. Instead, they say that you’re not eligible for Medicaid unless you meet the requirements.
One of those requirements is that you have to have a limited amount of money to be eligible. In general, a single person must have less than $2,000 before Medicaid can pay for a nursing home or other long term care.
A house that the person, or their husband or wife or certain other family members is living in wouldn’t usually count towards that $2,000 limit. But if no one is living in the house, like if the person has already moved out to a nursing home and the house is empty, then the house may count towards the $2,000 limit, meaning that Medicaid won’t pay for the person’s care while they own the house.
So in this scenario, Medicaid isn’t taking the house, but they’re saying that the person will need to sell the house and spend down the money before Medicaid can pay for their long term care.
And if the person works with an elder law attorney, we can often come up with a plan to spend down that money in a way that benefits the person or keeps money in the family.
Now the one exception here, where Medicaid really can take your house, is through a program called estate recovery. Under this estate recovery program, Medicaid can collect against your estate for certain expenses that it paid during your lifetime. So if a person owns a house when they pass away, and Medicaid spent a lot of money on them during their lifetime, Medicaid could possibly collect their expenses against the house after the person is gone.
The rules around how Medicaid treats a house, and especially on Medicaid planning and estate recovery, are very complicated, and this isn’t something you should try to do on your own, you should work with an elder law attorney on these issues. Nothing in this video is legal advice, since I don’t know about your situation specifically, but if you have questions about Medicaid, nursing homes, your house, or other elder law issues, call or email FriedmanLaw.