Medicaid policy regarding old planning

A question comes up frequently for Medicaid planning attorneys such as those at Rizzo & Associates.

Clients want to know how the Department of Human Services will treat planning techniques that may be prohibited in the future. The current hot topic relevant to this is "income-producing property" which used to be an exempt asset. The laws changed in 2007 to start considering income-producing property a countable asset.

The Elder Law Section of the State Bar of Michigan presented this question to DHS. Below is the verbatim answer:

"When policy changes, the change is effective the date of the bulletin unless otherwise noted. If property was exempted and our policy changes, we would not go back and determine that the exempted property is now countable. That being said, if there were other changes that took place regarding said property, we would want to evaluate it to be sure the status of the property was the same as it was when it was exempted."

In plain English, if the planning was good at the time of applying for Medicaid, it won't become bad when DHS performs its annual recertification.