Congress is about to tighten the rules for elderly individuals who use Medicaid to pay for their nursing home care. Medicaid is supposed to be a program to provide medical assistance to the poor, but over the years, middle class elderly have resorted to using the program to prevent themselves from being bled financially dry by nursing home bills that typically run $7,000-$10,000 a month. In order to qualify, these middle class elderly shift funds to their children and grandchildren in order to appear destitute. They often get help from eldercare attorneys so everything is neat and legal.
Now Congress is imposing rules that say, in effect: If you made financial transfers within five years of going into a nursing home, we reserve the right to refuse Medicaid coverage.
I can relate to what’s going on because, some ten years ago, I sat in an eldercare lawyer’s office with my mother, trying to figure out how to re-juggle my parents’ finances so my father could qualify for Medicaid. He had Alzheimers disease, and it was only a matter of months before he would need to go into a nursing home. The idea behind the re-juggling was simple: We wanted to protect my mother from being thrown into poverty by the crushing nursing home expenses my father was about to run up.
In the view of the Congress, the approach we took, and which many thousands of other individuals take, is tantamount to fraud. One member of Congress, Nathan Deal of Georgia, was quoted as saying that wealthy elders are abusing the system by "buying two Mercedes, giving them to their children and…reducing themselves to poverty."
The way I felt sitting in that lawyer’s office was quite the opposite. I saw my parents, who had both worked hard and paid taxes for more than 40 years, being abused by a government unwilling to extend a helping hand when one of them was sick and infirm. Moreover, that government was forcing us as a family to exploit loopholes in the system, all so that my mother could have some minimal financial protection after my father died.
As it turned out, my father died before any of the protections we had worked out actually went into effect. But I’ve always felt resentful about our government’s efforts to avoid its obligations in the healthcare arena, by casting hardworking and honest taxpayers as frauds when they merely try to avoid being impoverished at a turning point in their lives…so they can die in dignity.
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