Medi-Cal Estate Recovery
The Medi-Cal program must seek repayment from the estates of certain deceased Medi-Cal beneficiaries. Repayment only applies to benefits received by these beneficiaries on or after their 55th birthday and those who owned assets at the time of death. If a deceased beneficiary owns nothing when they die, nothing will be owed.
For Medi-Cal members who died on or after January 1, 2017.
Repayment will be limited only to estate assets subject to probate that were owned by the deceased beneficiary at the time of death.
Repayment will be limited to payments made, including managed care premiums paid, for nursing facility services, home and community based services, and related hospital and prescription drug services received when the beneficiary was an inpatient in a nursing facility or received home and community based services.
California has very lax rules in regards to transferring a home to a trust. In CA, a home, even in a revocable trust, is safe from Medicaid’s Estate Recovery Program. This is very unusual. In most circumstances, revocable trusts do not keep assets safe from Medicaid’s asset limit, nor Estate Recovery.
Furthermore, CA can only seek reimbursement of long-term care costs from those assets that go through probate, a legal process where a deceased person’s assets are distributed. If assets have been transferred to a revocable living trust, it is safe from Estate Recovery.
This means it will avoid both probate and Estate Recovery and the need for MAPTs are not as great in the state of CA as in other states.