“My parents have always had separate investment accounts. Dad is being admitted to a nursing home, but mom will be able to keep her account, right?”
The question of whether a parent can keep accounts in their own names often comes up when somebody, one of them, has gone into a nursing home. So let’s just say that the husband goes into a nursing home and the wife is now at home and she’s concerned about the cost of nursing home care and is she going to be able to get her husband on Medicaid. She inherited $80,000 from her mom. She’s kept it in her own name this whole time. People often think that that’s protected because they had it in their own name for years and years.
When there’s a married couple and one goes into a nursing home, it really doesn’t matter whether it’s titled jointly or individually. For a couple, they’re going to count all countable assets. So if it’s countable, and a bank account is 100% countable, stocks are 100% countable, then they’re going to be part of the Medicaid eligibility consideration. It doesn’t matter if you inherited it. It doesn’t matter if you just even won the lottery and it’s in your own name, it’s going to be counted.
