Can Medicaid or the nursing home take your home in Florida?

Attorney Tom Olsen: Robert, we know on a day-to-day basis, people are asking this question, "Tom, if I go into a nursing home, will they take my home away from me?" Let's go ahead and answer that for the listeners out there today.

Attorney Robert Hidock: Okay. The answer to that is no, they won't. When we look at assets for Medicaid, we look at countable and non-countable. The home is a non-countable asset, and there is always an intent to return home, so one in this world is taking that house, the state of Florida, Medicaid, no one. However, doesn't mean that there aren't situations that we have to address. If you have someone that's no longer living in the home and they're living in a skilled nursing facility, it's up to the family to keep the house going, so to speak.

Somebody still has to pay insurance, someone still has to pay property tax, AC, cut the grass, all that kind of good stuff. Ultimately the house is protected. Then, as you know, in what you do when you do your estate plan, I do the same thing in Medicaid planning, we always lock that house down with an enhanced life estate or a lady bird deed, so the house doesn't go into probate. State of Florida can come after an estate for recovery, but if the house is not in the estate, a house just goes to the beneficiaries the way their loved ones intended.

Tom: Listeners out there, they don't have to do anything to protect their home from cost of a nursing home or Medicaid. It's automatically protected and they don't have to do anything. What we want to do is to avoid probate on it so that when the person passes away, it will automatically go to the heirs, no headaches, no hassles, no probate.

Robert: Exactly.

Tom: Robert, you and I were having a discussion recently about that that's not true in all states. Medicaid is a combination of both state and federal law. What's true here in the state of Florida is not necessarily true in other states, and Florida is pretty generous as far as Medicaid is concerned.

Robert: We are very blessed. We have a very good elder care lobbying group that we have benefits that no other states really have. I had a conference yesterday with a family that just moved here from New Jersey and they were ecstatic that they weren't losing the house and they weren't even losing the rental property because that's non-countable asset because it's income-producing. In fact they're like, "Wait, we have to tell all of our relatives that when they're starting to get sick, they need to come to Florida." You ask New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, they all take the house. It's gone.

Tom: We're talking about these people that had a home in Florida, they came from New Jersey but they had a home and rental property here in Florida.

Robert: Correct.

Tom: We were able to protect the home and the rental property, which is pretty amazing.

Robert: It is indeed.

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