Many Americans rely on Medicaid when fighting diseases
Salvatore LoGrande’s children vowed to keep him in the white, pitched-roof home he had worked so hard to acquire all those decades before, even while he battled cancer and all the suffering it brought.
Thus, Sandy LoGrande believed it was an error when, a year following her father’s passing, Massachusetts sent her a $177,000 bill for her father’s Medicaid costs and threatened to file a lawsuit for his house if she didn’t promptly pay.
Also read: The Dukan Diet: Definition, Mechanism, And Professional Opinion
Medicaid Offices
The 57-year-old LoGrande told her father, “The home was everything.”
However, the bill and the threat it accompanied weren’t an error.
Instead, it was a standard procedure that the federal government mandates all states follow in order to obtain funds from the estates of deceased individuals who, in their last years, depended on Medicaid, the government-funded health insurance program for the nation’s poorest citizens.
Generally, a person’s house is not eligible for Medicaid. However, for persons over 55 who utilized Medicaid to pay for long-term care, including stays in nursing homes or in-home medical care, it is subject to the estate recovery procedure.
A Democratic senator suggested eliminating the “cruel” scheme completely this month. Opponents claim the program only receives 1% of the more than $150 billion Medicaid spends annually on long-term care, which is an excessive amount. Additionally, they contend that many states do not alert Medicaid recipients to the possibility of large funeral costs and property claims awaiting their heirs when they pass away.
That’s how, according to LoGrande, she found herself in a two-year legal struggle with Massachusetts following her father’s passing. She had consulted a nearby nonprofit several years before his death in 2016 for guidance on taking care of her aging father. The group advised her to apply for Medicaid for him. She even recalls enquiring about the residence, but was told the authorities would only look for the house if it sent her father to a nursing home
Liens are legal rights that can be placed on a residence in some states but not in others. While some Medicaid offices only pursue the costs associated with long-term care, others attempt to recover all medical expenses from individuals, including doctor visits and prescription drugs. While other states have sought thousands of homes totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, Alaska and Arizona have only pursued a handful of properties in recent years.
The Health and Human Services inspector general’s review into the Kansas program, which was made public on Tuesday, revealed that the program was efficient in terms of cost, producing $37 million while only needing to spend $5 million to collect the money. However, not all qualified estates had their money collected by the state.
A foundation supporting one of the largest health insurance companies in the business demanded last month that Massachusetts restructure its procedure, which includes recovering the majority of Medicaid spending above and beyond the federal government’s minimal threshold for long-term care costs. The Massachusetts Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation suggested that the state legislature enact legislation outlawing the extra collections.
According to Katherine Howitt, the foundation’s Medicaid policy director, estate recovery “has the potential to perpetuate wealth disparities and intergenerational poverty.”
After her mother passed away in 2021, Imani Mfalme found herself in a similar situation in Tennessee, which last year recovered more than $38.2 million from more than 8,100 estates.
Mfalme stayed with her mother while her early-onset Alzheimer’s disease grew worse. However, Mfalme began considering other choices after receiving a double mastectomy diagnosis in 2015 due to breast cancer. She invited the local Medicaid office to a meeting that she arranged at her mother’s house. The agent instructed her to empty her mother’s bank accounts, which Mfalme had been using to pay for her mother’s assisted care facility, in order for her mother to be eligible for the program.
In a gridlocked Congress where some Republicans are clamoring to trim Medicaid entitlements, the bill is unlikely to garner the bipartisan support needed to become law.
There’s at least one person who acknowledges the rule isn’t working: the man who engineered it.
Many people don’t know about the decades-old mandate, which was intended to encourage people to save for long-term care or risk losing equity in their homes, explained Stephen Moses, who now works for the conservative Paragon Health Institute.
“The plan here was to ensure that people who need long-term care can get it but that you plan ahead to be able to pay privately so you don’t end up on the public health care program,” Moses said.
Also read: Cases Of Measles In The Chicago Migrant Shelter Outbreak Reach Four
images source: Google
Disclaimer: The opinions and suggestions expressed in this article are solely those of the individual analysts. These are not the opinions of HNN. For more, please consult with your doctor
