Can't Texas Medicaid Put a Lien on this House

The State of Texas has alot of info on the DHHS site regarding MERP - Medicaid Estate Recovery Program. When whomever put granny in the NH, if they signed her in as Medicaid or "Medicaid pending", then they signed an agreement to MERP for any and all property that granny owned.

How Texas MERP runs is that when probate is done on gran's estate there will be a lien on any real property she owned, that shows up during probate. All MERP is done within probate. The lein may or may not show up on the county's tax assesors data or recorded in the courthouse or post a notice on the house.

You are lucky you are in TX as probate there is pretty simple and could be done without an attorney if there are no complications.

The immediate complication I see is that your dad could not legally deed the property to you if she was put into a NH on medicaid since 2003 or 2004 (whatever the year was that TX did MERP legislation). If you bought the property at fair market value and the money went into gran's bank account and the money was used for her care, then it would be a valid sale and you should already have title to the house. But if he just deeded it to you and all you have is a paper stating that and there has been no legal transfer of the property to your name, then you do not own the property. It's not till probate is done that the property can be release/titled to whomever is the heir according to her will and they transfer or sell it to you. If MERP said they would do a release then that would be filed by MERP
in probate.

Were you paying the home equity loan on the house? If so, then you need to present to the court that information so that $ can be recovered from her estate.
The more documents, like cancelled checks, you present to the court the easier it is for the judge to do whatever in your favor.

MERP is actually done by an outside contractor for the State. When gran died you or your dad had a period of time to file a financial listing of items you or your dad or whomever did things for her or her property that will be deducted from her estate.

For example, I keep a list of all the expenses that I have paid on my mom's house - like taxes, insurance, maintenance, etc. ALong with a copy of the check or a receipt for cash payments (like for the yard guys). So whenever the day comes that she dies, I have it done so MERP knows that I will be filing $XX amount of money to be recovered first from her estate.

If gran was in the NH for only 4 months, then the amount that Medicaid paid is probably low. 4 months X $ 5K = $ 20K Medicaid. Not enough to be worth it especially if the house has other leins or is in an area where it can't be sold easily
or the value of the house is low to begin with. So lucky you on that.

There is a formula as to whether they go after the proceeds from the sale of the house - I haven't found it yet but I bet it's a recovery of more than 75K.

When MERP was done, real estate was HOT - back in the days when everybody thought they could flip houses and make a ton of money. Property values were skyrocketing. Now it's totally different. The State really can't afford to inheirit thousands of MERP properties so they are probably only going after the ones
that there is real $$ to be made from and that can be easily sold.

I would suggest that you get a probate attorney to clear up the deed issues. You want someone who's office is in the county where gran's property is, not where you live. The cost is actually reasonable as alot of it is document-running that is done by paralegals on behalf of the attorney.

Also in TX you have 4 years from the initial filing to close probate. Which is a huge amount of time, so you don't have to be rushed to get things done. Good luck!