You need to carefully reexamine who the asset recovery provisions actually apply to. Among other things, it'd save you time writing lengthy comments about your mistaken conclusion.
You can find various corner cases where Medicaid estate recovery isn't an issues. Yes. Yet this is NOT reality for the vast majority of those being shoved into the program by the tens of millions.
I am very well informed on this front, having sought the advice of top attorneys in this domain. This is very real. You can choose to study the links I provided and educate yourself or reject it while armed with imperfect information.
In the end reality isn't modified. We'll probably start seeing the effects of this during the next twenty years. Maybe then people will wake up.
Medicaid is intended to be a further benefit for people that have low incomes.
It's only surprising that it examines an estate if you don't understand that it isn't designed to be anything more than a benefit of last resort.
Sure, you can't have Medicaid pay for your parents care and also keep their estate. But this isn't mind blowing information, it's the way the law was designed to work and something anyone involved in estate planning would know off hand.
Here's a tid-bit:
Quote: "Does Medicare Pay For Long Term Care?
NO. After a 3 day hospital stay, Medicare pays 100% of the cost, but only for the first 20 days of skilled nursing care. For days 21 through 100, you are responsible for a co-payment. As of this date, the daily co-pay rate is $148 per day.
But it gets worse: After 100 days of care in a nursing home, Medicare stops paying altogether, and you are responsible for all future costs, unless there is a new 3 day qualifying hospital stay (which then re-sets the 100 day clock).
You also need to be aware that Medicare does not pay for “custodial care.” If you or a loved one are in need of custodial care, it must be paid for either by writing a check, by private long-term care insurance, or by Medi-Cal."
I am not going to bother providing you with links because you are obviously not reading anything. If you are truly interested in understanding the issues you need to spend half a day googling around to build a better image of what reality looks like.
Also, my wife is a doctor. She, among other things, has dealt with precisely the segment "served" by all of these programs for at least ten years. She has left that practice. And so have tons of doctors. This is the other side of the equation.
These programs work for some but, on the aggregate, they are a disaster. It is impossible for doctors to provide good care. Patients are getting screwed right and left. My wife would easily see a dozen patients a week for free because there was no possible way to justify doing it under these programs.
The vast majority of people are extremely ignorant of the realities in US health care.
Anyhow, that's the end of it. Thanks.
It's a fine thing if you want to argue that Medicaid should more generously protect the assets of the elderly, go ahead. Just don't make shit up out of whole cloth about how a young mother is going into debt to the government when she and her child have bills paid through Medicaid. That's just flat out not true. Maybe ask your doctor wife about that.
I do understand that Medicare doesn't do much for long term care. But long term care isn't a big source of the million dollar medical events you are ranting about, absent the need for further medical care, it generates a reasonably predictable monthly bill.