Will Nursing Home Medicaid Take My House (Or Bank Account)?

This is a very common question many people have when a parent or spouse enters a nursing home in Houston, Conroe, or anywhere in Texas. After all, your house and other assets represent a lifetime of saving and sacrificing which nobody does with the expectation of losing everything to nursing home bills of over $5,000 a month. The good news is Texas will not take your homestead or other asset, but that does not mean those assets are protected.

Texas does not take anything from anybody who applies for Medicaid. They leave the choice of what happens with your home and other assets entirely up to you. The way it works is that the burden is on you to meet specific Medicaid nursing home eligibility requirements. If you insist on keeping assets in a way that prevents you from meeting those eligibility requirements then the HHSC simply denies Medicaid nursing home benefits.

If Medicaid is not going to pay the bill, then you will need to make other arrangements to pay the nursing home in order to avoid eviction. They won’t take assets from you and at the end of the day they care very little about what you specifically do with your assets as long as when you come to them you meet all of the nursing home Medicaid eligibility requirements. One of those requirements is not having a Medicaid penalty so giving assets away blindly is not a plan that will work.

If you want to take control of the situation, then you can be like my clients that take the necessary steps to reposition their assets in order to meet the nursing home Medicaid requirements sooner than spending everything down to the minimum levels. Texas does not take anything from them, rather they have reviewed the reality of the situation and made a decision that the savings achieved by creating Medicaid eligibility sooner exceeds the cost.

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