On September 6, Governor Maura Healey signed a consequential long term care oversight bill, An Act to improve quality and oversight of long-term care (H.5033), into law. This law substantially strengthens state oversight and enforcement of long term care and assisted living facilities while also requiring facilities to create outbreak plans should a health issue arise.
Included in the law is a bill that I filed in partnership with Representative Christine Barber to extensively scale back the Commonwealth’s Medicaid estate recovery program to the federally-required minimum.
MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program, demands repayment after death from the estates or families of people who received Medicaid long-term health care services after age 55. While federal law mandates that some Medicaid costs be reimbursed this way, the MassHealth Estate Recovery program went way beyond the federally-set floor.
Federal law requires recovery only for long-term care, like nursing home care. Yet in Massachusetts, MassHealth demanded repayment from the families of deceased recipients who received any Medicaid services over age 55, including hospital care, doctors’ care, prescription drugs, physical therapy, and any other service.
Over 90 percent of these repayments to MassHealth came from the forced sale of the family home.
This issue was first brought to me in 2019 by constituents who received a bill from MassHealth after a family member died. These constituents would have been forced to sell their family home, where a family member was living, in order to pay the bill. My team and I were able to work with them to get a hardship waiver, but we knew then that the law needed to be changed.
As we worked on the legislation, one of the strongest advocates for the bill was Amherst constituent, Joe Tringali. Joe was a 45-year member of the Stavros Center for Independent Living; a passionate, beloved, and fierce leader in the disability justice movement. He passed away on December 27, 2023.
In early January 2024, I had the honor of adjourning the Senate in Joe’s memory, joined by his family members and friends in the chamber. To learn more about Joe’s fierce advocacy, click here.
To learn more about the new estate recovery law, click here.
