Before entering a nursing home, should the title to the patients home be changed to avoid the asset being used by patient care?

In North Carolina, if you sell the home prior to getting Medicaid, you must spend down the proceeds to less than $2000 and have receipts showing the monies have all been spent on your parent(s). Or, like the above comment, the state can file a claim on the estate and recoup monies. I am in the same situation....my mother is pending Medicaid approval and the modest home is her only asset. Once Medicaid is approved, there will be no money for property taxes, insurance, and utilites. The other 3 siblings will not go in and divide costs, so I cannot take on the financial responsibilty alone. And, I don't think there's any real point of keeping up the taxes, etc if the state will take the home in the end. I would have been paying taxes just to get reimbursed at some point.

If anyone has any experience with this, please comment.

ChristyDist, everyone who has paid into it is entitled to (forced to take, really) Medicare. (Medicare does not cover long term care.) Medicare is not at all concerned with your assets or income.

Medicaid is a needs-based program. To be eligible you must have a need (such as a handicap or being elderly and unable to care for yourself or having dementia, etc.) and also fall below certain income and asset requirements. If you have more assets than are allowed, you are expected to use them up on your own needs first, and when that money runs out, apply for help. You cannot, for example, set aside all your assets for your children to inherit and then say, "I'm poor. Help me financially.

Is that Medicare or Medicaid that does that...or both? Just curious. My mom has NOTHING at all of her own but I'm still curious.

I think that you are concerned about Medicaid requirements, right?

Transferring the title to someone else will be considered by Medicaid to be a "gift," and there will be penalties in terms of when Medicaid coverage can start. Medicaid "looks back" over financial transactions for the last 5 years.

You parents may keep the house and be eligible for Medicaid, but they will not have funds to pay the insurance, taxes, and upkeep.

When both parents die, the state can recover their costs of NH from the proceeds of the house sale. If someone has been paying the taxes, etc. and has kept records of those expenses, that person will be reibursed their expenses. It is not likely that there would be much for the 4 children to divide after all this happens.

(Persons who enter a nursing home on Medicaid seldom have anything to leave to their heirs.)