A Nursing Home Cannot Take Your Ohio House. Medicaid Estate Recovery Can.

Why the fear exists

The facility bills $9,000 or more a month and somebody must pay, so families assume the building itself is on the line. It is not. The house is generally an exempt asset while you are alive: Ohio Medicaid does not count it against the $2,000 limit as long as your equity is under $752,000 as of 2026, or a qualifying person lives in it, or you state an intent to return home.

Where the house actually becomes vulnerable

Exempt for eligibility does not mean exempt forever. After a Medicaid recipient dies, the Ohio Attorney General's office can present a claim against the estate for what Medicaid spent. Abby N. Wilson's office has handled these claims first-hand; they are routine, not rare, and they arrive when families are least prepared for them.

Ohio's version is broader than most states. Recovery here reaches the probate estate and beyond it: survivorship interests, transfer-on-death deeds, and life estates created after 2002 are all within reach. Deed tricks that defeat recovery elsewhere often fail in Ohio.

What genuinely protects the home

Three occupant protections stop recovery outright: a surviving spouse in the home, a child under 21, or a blind or permanently disabled child living there. Separately, the caregiver-child exception allows the home to be transferred during life, penalty-free, to an adult child who lived there 2 years providing care that kept the parent out of a facility.

For everyone else, protection means planning: an irrevocable trust holding the home for 5 years before Medicaid removes it from the estate entirely. The comparison with simply deeding it to the kids, which triggers the look-back penalty and a capital-gains cost, is in gifting the house versus a trust. The full protection playbook is in protecting your house from estate recovery.

The move to avoid

Do not add a child to the deed or sign the house over informally. Inside the 60-month window that is a penalized gift, divided by $7,787 per month of ineligibility, per the look-back rule, and it hands the house's tax basis problem to your children as a bonus.

The caveat to weigh: recovery only claims what Medicaid actually spent. For a short stay the claim may be small, and hardship waivers exist. The house question is rarely all-or-nothing; it is a timing-and-paperwork question.