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For
Medicaid eligibility purposes, gifting of assets could create a period of
ineligibility if a spouse is seeking to have Medicaid pay for a form of
institutional care, e.g., nursing home care.
In the instant case, the well spouse who was separated from the ill
spouse made some gifts and the issue before the court was whether it is
appropriate to treat attribute those gifts to the ill spouse and thus
impose a period of ineligibility. The
spouse issue was resolved by testimony of an ongoing relationship. The
court seemed to leave the door open to a different conclusion in a
situation where a married couple separated and had no contact.
Thus there was at least an implicit recognition that a separation
with no contact may be sufficient to treat the spouse as if not a spouse
for purposes of determining whether a gift by a spouse was made.
The resolution was important because the person in need of the
Medicaid was not the gift giver but the spouse of the gift giver.
Gifts by a nonspouse would be irrelevant and not cause a period of
ineligibility. The
court considered whether another gift was actually a loan.
The record indicated that there was a token repayment, no schedule
for repayment and no interest rate. Thus,
it found a gift. Wouldn’t a
loan receivable be treated as a resource in any event? A
gift of a 50% interest in a farm was made and the petitioner sought to
apply a discount to the value of the gift owing to the fact that the gift
constituted a fractional interest in real property.
The appellate court indicated while such a discount may be
available for gift and estate tax purposes, no such concept was recognized
in the Social Services Law of New York.
For
those who are interested the decision may be found at In the Matter of
Clifford Campbell, 787 N.Y.S.2d 491; 2005 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 75.
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