Medicaid: Who Is Eligible For Medicaid?

Assets which Medicaid considers to be resources ("countable assets") include:

• Real property which the applicant owns.
• Cash and bank accounts.
• Stocks and bonds.

As a general matter, depending on the state, people can qualify for Medicaid without selling their home. All Medicaid programs exempt one home. There is a limitation on the amount of equity in the home (market value minus debt) for the home to be exempt.. The minimum limit over which your home is counted is $500,000. Maximum limit is $750,000.

Most programs also exempt one vehicle (to help you get to and from medical treatments.) Some states put limits on the value of the exempted vehicle.

Medicaid also usually does not count:

• Burial plots
• Burial funds kept separate (to a maximum amount). This generally also includes pre-paid funerals if not revocable or refundable.
• Small life insurance policies or at least policies with small accumulated cash values
• Wedding rings
• Other items exempted by Social Security but with varying limits on the amount that will be exempt.

Medicaid does count the assets of your spouse if the two of you are living together. Medicaid also counts jointly held assets. The rules for jointly held assets differ depending on whether the joint owner is a spouse or not as follows

• Husband and Wife:
  • Medicaid looks at assets of both the patient and the healthy spouse as long as husband and wife are the joint owners â€" no matter which spouse actually owns which part of the asset.
  • The manner in which title is registered has no bearing on Medicaid eligibility.
• Not Husband and Wife:
  • If the joint owners are not husband and wife, the patient is only attributed with his share of ownership of the jointly held asset, except for bank accounts.
  • Bank accounts are 100% attributable to the patient unless either party can provide proof of what part was contributed by the patient and what part by the healthy joint owner.               

As noted above, there are legal means of decreasing countable assets to qualify for Medicaid. For instance, there are states that apply different rules about resources to the Medically Needy. Those states do not require spending down resources so much as proof that the bills are consistently large enough to erase the resources rapidly if used to pay them.

To learn the resource limits in your state, see: http://covertheuninsured.org/stateguides/ . 

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