My grandfather was named for his grandfather and his grandfather was named for a beloved uncle who died at the Battle of Springfield in New Jersey during the Revolutionary War. Our family had been forced to flee from that conflict to the safety and warm embrace of the mountains of northwestern New Jersey. And there they stayed. For over 200 years they lived and worked and created an American homeland. My grandfather was sent to France as doughboy during WWI, witnessing horrors that were hard to describe. He then watched as his son was posted to the Pacific Theater of WWII. His son, my uncle, came home. My mother never strayed too far from home for too long. By the time she was 43, she was a widow with four children. She had a love of country nd instilled in me a strong interest in the American political system. Every four years we would huddle in front of the television screen together to watch every minute of both political party’s conventions.
My mother never accumulated much wealth during her life but she always paid the property taxes on the small house and four acres of land that she had inherited and, as long as she could sit in her yard and listen for the peepers on June day, she had what she wanted in the world. Then tragedy stuck. My mother was caught in a fire and her house burned down. She was badly burned and not expected to live. Totally incapacitated, she was placed in a nursing home. Her modest income, with a homestead exemption for her land qualified her for Medicaid. She came under the umbrella of Medicaid Estate Recovery. Being so sick, I doubt that she fully understood what she was signing on for-if she had been a bit wealthier or if there had not been a fire, she might have had a planned estate that saved her land but that did not happen.
At the time of her death, her land, land that our family has owned since at least 1778, will be confiscated and sold to the highest bidder by the Medicaid Estate Recovery Program.
This program in the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 (OBRA).
was part of the “Welfare Reforms” enacted during the Clinton Administration. Medicaid payments for the care of people who are over the age of 55 with low incomes is the only federal benefit where repayments are mandated.
A series of analytical studies have shown that this program specifically targets the elderly poor. Because they are simply too sick and too old to protest too loudly it has been allowed to slowly take what little of value the aged poor possess. It seems reasonable to take the bank accounts and other assets to pay for care, but a home should be left alone. This legislation was an early harbinger of the wholesale and callous home seizures that have recently become more common events. The sanctity of the American home is, it seems, a thing of the past, especially for the poor.
Medicaid Estate Recovery should be included in the scope of the current American social conscious and can only be resolved by changes at the federal level. The social security rates for the indigent elderly poor should be raised to a realistic level to cover the true cost of nursing home care, or, a homestead exemption from Medicaid Estate Recovery should be mandated.It may be too late for my mother’s land and heritage to be preserved, but I feel compelled to protect other families from a similar fate.
Medicaid Estate Recovery is a federal mandate that needs to be fixed in Washington.
If you would like to see Medicaid Estate Recovery reforms write or call your Congressman and Senators. Tell them Medicaid Estate Recovery has to be reformed to end this inequity. Attempting to fix the American Medical system or fill holes in the deficit by taking the homes of the elderly poor is morally wrong. It is bad public policy as well as a great social injustice.
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