Medicaid, the government program that provides health care to more than 75 million low-income and disabled Americans, isn’t necessarily free. It’s the only major welfare program that can function like a loan. Medicaid recipients over the age of 55 are expected to repay the government for many medical expenses—and states will seize houses and other assets after those recipients die in order to satisfy the debt.
Opponents of estate recovery say that the harm of destabilizing low-income families does not justify the meager returns. “It’s a drop in the bucket given the amount of misery they cause people,” says Patricia McGinnis, the executive director of the California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, which co-sponsored successful 2016 legislation to limit the assets Medicaid can recover in California.
“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.”
By contrast, she says, “you could have a $100,000 heart operation on Medicare and there’s no recovery.” One lawyer in Tennessee recalled a case in which a woman went to her late mother’s Medicaid auction to buy back quilts that had been passed down for generations.
Article submitted by, Darkillusion.
