To the editor:
Consider this scenario. You are a middle-class homeowner who is 55 years old. You get cancer. You can’t work and lose your job. You sign up for MassHealth. You get the care you need and recover. Then the lien letter arrives from MassHealth. There is now a lien on your home. You no longer can leave your house to your children. The government will inherit it instead.
Federal law requires that state programs like MassHealth recover Medicaid expenses from the estates of folks who were on the system and who are 55 years of age or older. Massachusetts has one of the worst implementations of this law and aggressively pursues recovery from the estates of thousands of Massachusetts residents each year.
Many folks in the Berkshires have only one shot at home ownership: inheriting their parent’s home? With current real estate prices, the children of MassHealth subscribers won’t be able to buy a different house if they lose their inherited house to MassHealth in probate liquidation. This forces older parents between 55 and 65 to consider foregoing the insurance they need to protect their estate for their children and thereby suffer the health consequences of such a decision. This is wrong.
The law is especially unfair to the disabled and is ageist by definition. Its impact on intergenerational wealth is perhaps one of the reasons why Black families have one-fifteenth the wealth of white ones, and how the deck is stacked against working families of all stripes.
I respectfully urge Vice President Harris to support the repeal of the estate-recovery provisions of Medicaid. Until Congress does so and the president signs such a repeal into law, I respectfully urge Governor Healey, our delegation, and all members of the Massachusetts Senate and House of Representations to support S.726 and H.1168, an act protecting the homes of seniors and disabled people on MassHealth, presented by Sen. Comerford and Rep. Barber.
Let’s work together to protect intergenerational homeownership in Berkshire County, in Massachusetts, and throughout the United States. As we invest billions in housing, it makes no sense to lose local homeowners of modest means to this ridiculous and unfair federal law and Massachusetts’ implementation thereof.
Patrick White
Stockbridge Select Board member
Stockbridge
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