We have been married a long time and my husband has a lot of medical problems. I anticipate in the near future he will need a nursing home. In order to help preserve our assets we are thinking about a divorce. How long in advance do we have to do this before he can make a claim for Medicaid?
You can divorce your spouse no matter what, assuming you have grounds according to your state's laws. What the article explains is that you can't have a friendly divorce, give all the assets to one spouse, and then claim Medicaid for the other as a way of - not to put too fine a point on it - cheating the system.
It's pretty sad that a family/couple can't do as they please while finalizing end of life care. Being married is pretty d*mn important to many couple, for a variety of reasons, and having to sever your marriage in order to receive proper assistance – without wiping out the other partner – is abhorrent. What a disgusting country we are ...
I hope you can divorce your husband if you want to! But if there is suspicion that you divorced just to get medicare...they might investigate. But how would they even know why you divorced..so I think it would be really hard for them to do anything. If my husband has to go into assisted living or nursing, I will probably divorce him...but we have long term care insurance...just for that reason so it won't deplete our savings, etc.
i do not understand that every state has different rules for medicaid my spouse is in a nh on mass health /medicaid..i the community spouse wants to move back to Fla because of health and transfer my spouse there also the nh there..owners of mass nh are out of Fla so why do I have to apply all over again there..also is there a six month resident waiting period?
I have actually thought about this ...possibility of a divorce...my husband is much older than I am..by 18 years...and currently his health if getting worse and worse and at this point he can hardly walk. He is still able to remain at home. Anyway, I personally, don't think it's fair to use all of our assets for his care as I will need assets to live on for the rest of my life which might be 30 more years if I'm lucky. I do have LTC insurance on both of us. His is for a term of 5 years but if he needs longer then that it might be a problem. Any suggestions for married couples in this type of situation. Thank you.
Medicaid is onto this type of planning and will simply claim his half of the assets, with or without a divorce. So many people did this in the past that Medicaid now sees it as hiding assets, and goes after them.
My dad had a terrible wife who always threatened divorce for 30 years. He didn't want to because she threatened to take all his hard earned money. He just always hoped she'd die first. He got diagnosed w/Alzheimer in 2008. In mid-2012 she was fed up & was just plain going to divorce him w/her "hot shot lawyer," as she threatened him, & would "take all." He plummeted in his health & signed over his estate to my step bro. (Dad's wife's son) who was fattening the cow & made him his conservator. He was acting like he was on my dad's side in his increasing apathy. Then he was his representative in Dad's divorce to his mom. It wasn't an equitable divorce. They had 1.8 million. Does this sound legal or like medicaide fraud?
12 Comments
First Oldest
First
If I divorce my husband, will he be eligible for Medicaid?
my spouse is in a nh on mass health /medicaid..i the community spouse wants to move back to Fla because of health and transfer my spouse there also the nh there..owners of mass nh are out of Fla so why do I have to apply all over again there..also is there a six month resident waiting period?