Do not let a nursing home take your house

29 Aug 2023 · 1 min

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1:01

In this concise consumer‑advice video, the speaker warns viewers that nursing‑home care can be prohibitively expensive—often $6,000 to $12,000 per month—and that qualifying for Medicaid requires reducing assets to roughly $2,000‑$3,000. Once Medicaid pays for care, the program treats the assistance as a loan, placing a lien on any owned home to recover the costs after the beneficiary’s death. The speaker explains that the primary way to protect a house from Medicaid’s estate‑recovery claim is to transfer the property into a Medicaid Asset Protection Trust (MAPT) before needing care, and to keep the home in that trust for at least five years to satisfy the Medicaid look‑back period. The video’s purpose is to alert families to the financial risk and to present a pre‑emptive legal strategy to safeguard their home.

Chapters

Do not let a nursing home take your house. For many people, a nursing home at some point in their life is an unfortunate reality. If that were to happen to you or to somebody in your family, what you'll find out is that nursing home care is expensive. The very cheapest ones are going to be around $6,000 a month, and they may be twice that much. To qualify for Medicaid benefits, you have to basically make yourself poor. To get the benefits, you have to have no more than $2,000 or $3,000 total. Once you qualify for the benefits, they'll pay for your care until you pass away. If you have a house, they will put a lien on that house for all the benefits that they paid to you. Medicaid is really nothing more than a loan. If you have assets to recover from, they will get their money back. So what can you do? One very easy thing to do is to put your home in a Medicaid asset protection trust, but this has to be done before you need the care, and the home has to be in that trust for 5 years. The home will be protected from any recovery by Medicaid. Check my