Medicaid Is A Scam
“Estate Recovery” in Massachusetts
By Richard Hugus | Aletho News | October 22, 2017
Medicaid is the supposed health care coverage in the United States for people under age 65. Medicare is for people 65 and over. “MassHealth” is the Massachusetts version of Medicaid. The current MassHealth application requires applicants to agree by signature to the following clauses. They should be read carefully:
“9. To the extent permitted by law, MassHealth may place a lien against any real estate owned by eligible persons or in which eligible persons have a legal interest. If MassHealth puts a lien against such property and it is sold, money from the sale of that property may be used to repay MassHealth for medical services provided.
10. To the extent permitted by law, and unless exceptions apply, for any eligible person 55 years of age or older, or any eligible person for whom MassHealth helps pay for care in a nursing home, MassHealth will seek money from the eligible person’s estate after death.”
People getting MassHealth assume they are getting health insurance. In fact, if they are over 55, they are only getting a loan for health coverage which they must pay back from their estate (their home, their savings, their personal property) after they die. The process by which the state recovers the cost of your health care coverage is is called “estate recovery.” The low income people whom MassHealth is supposed to serve may thus be unable to leave the one thing they might have — their family home — to their children.
MassHealth does not tell you exactly what health coverage they will be charging your estate for after you die — one must assume it is any and all health care provided. Nor are you told about monthly “capitation charges” (charges per head – a nice way of thinking about the public) just for being enrolled. This charge for a typical enrollee comes to almost $500 per month. If you wish to find out what your debt is while you are still living, and request a statement, MassHealth will not make it easy for you to get it and the statement will be no more than a spreadsheet copied out of their database, with no explanation of charges. The MassHealth Estate Recovery Unit says that, by law, it is not able to process MassHealth claims until the MassHealth recipient is dead and his estate enters probate. After death, of course, the recipient is no longer able to speak for him or herself or question any charges. MassHealth is basically giving low income people a collateralized loan and withholding both the total amount of the loan and a full explanation of the conditions of the loan so that the enrollee can never know what his debt is. Nor is it possible to clear your debt while living, as there is no process for that.
Those who are able to afford partial payments for their coverage are not subjected to estate recovery. In effect this is a penalty for being poor.
For people between the ages of 55 and 64, MassHealth, and the Affordable Care Act which it operates under, is a program designed to benefit the insurance industry rather than the low income people it is supposed to serve. According to one physician, “Medicaid, supposed to be a program to help the poor, has become a cash cow for multibillion-dollar, managed-care companies, who milk federal and state taxpayers.”
People who wish to leave something to their children after they die, and not saddle them with a debt for their health care costs, would be better off not enrolling in MassHealth and instead paying their medical costs out of pocket.
If someone gets a loan from a legitimate lending institution, things would be quite different. For example:
• In a legitimate loan agreement you would be entitled to a regular statement of costs incurred. MassHealth does not provide this. The enrollee is not even told that MassHealth will be charging nearly $500 per month for coverage, with no health care actually being provided. No accounting of any kind is provided.
• In a legitimate loan agreement you would expect to have a signed contract specifying your obligations and the obligations of the loan provider. People signing the MassHealth application agreement are, with just one sentence, giving up their rights to the family home and all their possessions. The agreement states: “To the extent permitted by law, for any eligible person age 55 or older . . . MassHealth will seek money after the eligible person’s estate after death.” What is “the extent permitted by law”? The terms are so vague as to be deceptive. By signing the MassHealth application, you are agreeing to a loan whose final cost will only be arrived at after you’re gone.
• In a legitimate loan agreement you would have the right of informed consent. The MassHealth application does not provide this. You don’t even know what you’re agreeing to.
• In a legitimate loan agreement you would be able to review cost statements and contest charges that you never agreed to, or charges for services that you perhaps never received. Under MassHealth, you would be unable to contest any charges not only because you were never informed of charges as they were being incurred, but also because no claim would be made until you were dead. MassHealth does not allow questioning of costs while you are alive, and after you are dead it’s obviously too late.
• In a legitimate loan agreement you would be able to pay off the loan and get a receipt in return saying the debt was paid. If you offer to pay MassHealth to be free of your debt, MassHealth will tell you that you can make a voluntary payment but you will not be given a receipt saying that all debts are paid. Your debt to the state is only settled when the state conducts an estate recovery claim against you and that claim is only issued during the probate process after you die. This bureaucratic rule violates what one might call a basic human right to pay off and be free of a debt. In a legitimate loan, the lender would certainly make it possible for a loan to be paid off ahead of schedule (i.e., before you die). By this rule MassHealth puts people in the absurd position of not being able to pay a debt even if they want to.
The terms by which MassHealth offers health coverage to low income people would, in any other context, be called fraudulent. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has no business purveying health care by such deceptive means. To add insult to injury if, after finding out about this scam, you decide to end your “coverage,” the Commonwealth will slap you with a “health care penalty” on your state tax returns for your failure to have health insurance. This amounts to coercion into an unfair agreement.
Some might think it is irresponsible not to have health insurance. Actually, it is irresponsible for the state of Massachusetts, or any state offering a similar Medicaid program, to be offering open-ended loans disguised as health insurance.
A valuable article on estate recovery under the national Affordable Care Act is at:
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October 22, 2017 - Posted by aletho | Deception, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | Massachusetts, MassHealth, Medicaid, United States
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what is wrong with having these parasites pay back some of what they stole. these people abuse their care racking up gigantic bills cause they think they do not have to pay
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Comment by SPQR70AD | October 22, 2017 |
If the poor are getting completely f_cked by Obamacare there is a bit of appropriate justice in that. They were the ones so uneducated, so misinformed, so ill-informed, that their mob of stupidity decided to vote me along into a prison now enslaving all of us.
Me? I’m poor too, and I got trapped and screwed by this already. BUT I DIDNT VOTE FOR IT BECAUSE I WASNT STUPID. There are ways around these things to include giving away property before you hit certain ages which have been used for decades by the savvy. “Medicare clawbacks” have existed since age 65 for a long time – big surprise the expansion of medicare to the younger would expand backwards the age – be thankful it’s only from the time youre 55 instead of say, 18.
How was I caught? My stupid parents didn’t use any of the medicaid loopholes I told them about, and so when dad got disabled early and then mom died, they took the family home. I had warned them for YEARS that they would lose nothing and gain everything simply setting up things in a trust or giving away the interest in the home while holding onto a life estate – but like all stupid poor people they let it happen to them and I literally ended up with bills from the process for having cosigned work the house had needed from before (like a new roof 2 years before they died and other repairs) where here i’m spending money, on a house the government TOOK, because my parents were TOO STUPID to do their due dilligence and wanted to think they would never die.
Every time I hear an article about all the things the big evil government is doing to victimized poor people I want to gag. Most of these things are people voting themself their own hell and then crying about it. NO pity anymore if your bad voting screws me, and I tried to already tell you how it was a scam but you as a group ignored me anyways.
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Comment by Angry Joe | October 22, 2017 |
What did you expect from MITTENS Romney?
The Romneys wrap themselves in the American FLAG but never wrap themselves in an American UNIFORM.
“patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”
(1) Great Grandpa Romney ran to Mexico to dodge American laws
(2) Grandpa Romney FLIP-FLOPPED back to America when Mexico got dangerous.
(3) Daddy Romney NEVER SERVED through WWII and Korea.
(4) MITTENS Romney used “missionary” deferments to DODGE the Viet Nam draft.
(5) FIVE sons, and NOT ONE ever wore an AMERICAN UNIFORM.
FIVE GENERATIONS, NINE “males”, and NOT ONE actually LOVED America enough to SERVE this Nation. The only thing “conservative” about the Romney Family is conserving THEIR OWN BEHINDS.
They hide their money OUTSIDE this country ….so they are always ready for a quick get-away just like Grandpaw did when he ran to Mexico..
No Romney ever comes back missing a limb, in a box, or with PTSD …….. because no Romney ever SERVES.
The Romneys love war …… because they get RICH but they never ever get HURT.
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Comment by Eddie Herbert | October 22, 2017 |
AHCCCS has been doing this for years. (Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System. ) The Clinton model for national health care? The one that the local paper always put in the 1st paragraph of any article “with known underworld ties,” thus implying that now that the state had taken over everything was good?
Even if you choose to die in order to be able to pass the property along to family you can’t because you will be judged as not of sound mind or caregivers can be imprisoned. It does seem fair to reimburse taxpayer dollars that saved your life after an accident or gave years of longterm care to mom after her money ran out. But we have learned not to trust our government or any of its functionaries and we know that it’s a big deep wide money hole that never gives back.
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Comment by kookooracharabioso | October 22, 2017 |
I am in agreement with Richard Hugus that we really have a problem with estate recovery for parts of the ACA, which exists in states that have not repaired their pre-ACA laws and regulations, including MA.
(The problem comes from an interaction of 1990s Medicaid laws with the ACA. The Medicaid laws require states to recover nursing home Medicaid costs payed out, but gives states the option of recovering medical Medicaid costs, which is where the ACA, with its expanded Medicaid gets sucked in.)
Thus, as Richard points out, in states which still recover all medical Medicaid costs, for people 55 and older who get expanded Medicaid, the ACA is precisely a “loan until death for uninsured medical expenses”. It’s not insurance, It’s a bomb. And the amount of money at stake can be over a million dollars.
Some states have corrected their own laws so that all of the ACA is real insurance: OR, WA, NY and CT (the latter incompletely; all of these 4 states at ACA start in 2014) and CA and MN in 2017.
MA has not done this as of July 2019, so people in MA get that loan until death bomb.
I have some details on web-pages for MA: http://nasmusicsoft.com/BlogMAEstateClawback1.html
(where the page mentions bills in front of the MA legislature to fix)
and also for the US in general: http://nasmusicsoft.com/BlogACAConsumerProblems.html
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Comment by Norm Spier | August 2, 2019 |