Quote Originally Posted by beerfarley View Post
I had no idea that it worked that way. That is insane they can just take all of your property like that.

I have BCBS insurance and besides the prescription benefits, it sucks. Almost a $2000 deductible before it pays anything. I despise having to pay for insurance.
They can't "take your property". They charge you for providing assisted living. It's pretty simple when you're single. You pay for care as long as you can, and if you ever don't have enough money to pay, Medicaid will pay. The "lookback" rules people are referencing are to make sure people needing assisted living don't give away their property to push the costs for their care onto taxpayers before they run out of money. That is all straightforward enough and eminently fair.

It gets complicated when you are married, as if you don't plan well, you can easily have a couple that saved diligently and have enough assets to live an upper middle class life in retirement, but don't have enough to cover $100k a year for one spouse while also maintaining the primary home and living expenses of the independent spouse. In those situations, one spouse needing assisted living can result in both spouses ending up with essentially nothing beyond a homestead and some pretty modest exempt income. I don't think you should really be forced to scramble more than one half the nest egg to care for a spouse, but that's an almost impossible standard to enforce.