Family Experience with Medicaid Recovery

We are dealing with this now. Our family home is a small 2-bedroom house in East Tennessee; it was built by our great-great-grandmother in the ’60s with the money she made selling Avon. We are low income and the only heirs to the home. My husband has developed severe anxiety and depression due to the thought of losing this house that has been in the family for seven generations. We are not a minority, but our story has been picked up by a reporter and is going to be featured in a national publication. We have no savings, can’t keep up with our current mortgage, and have a minor child and that home we care so deeply about seemed like our only glimmer of hope, and now because of estate recovery we are heartbroken and deeply hurt. We can’t get any answers from Tenncare on the process of what will happen. The law needs to be repealed. It hurts this nation’s most vulnerable. We had no choice but to get our grandfather Medicaid because we could not subject our child to his dementia. It wasn’t safe for anyone. We were never informed of MERP beforehand, and we could definitely not afford the $10,000 a month nursing home bill. What kills me most is we pay taxes our whole lives — we pay into the very system that steals from us, even in death.