The Claim After a Death
ORC 5162.21 — medicaid estate recovery, and what delays it
Families usually meet this as a letter arriving after a funeral, and the reaction is that somebody must have made a mistake. Nobody has. Medicaid paid for care, and the program is entitled to recover from the estate afterwards. Knowing that in advance changes what people do with a house years earlier.
Who handles this in Ohio: legal aid programs, lawyer referral and the state offices, listed in the Ohio directory.
Fifty five is the age it starts from. Recovery reaches care received by somebody aged fifty five or older who was not permanently institutionalized, and care received at any age by somebody who was permanently institutionalized. It is not limited to nursing home care and it is not limited to the very old.
It waits for a surviving spouse. Recovery may only be sought after the death of the surviving spouse. A widow or widower is not asked to sell the house to satisfy a claim against the person who died first. The claim does not disappear; it waits.
A house is reachable. Where recovery is sought against somebody who was permanently institutionalized, there are further protections while certain people lawfully live in the home, including a caregiver child and a sibling in defined circumstances.
Undue hardship can delay or waive it. Where recovery would cause undue hardship to a survivor, the right to immediate recovery may be delayed or waived, decided case by case. That is a provision to be applied for rather than one that operates on its own, and it exists precisely for the situation families assume is hopeless.
A running total can be asked for while somebody is still alive rather than discovered afterwards, which is the difference between planning and reacting.
“Is there a surviving spouse, and does anybody live in the house.”
What counts as the estate for this purpose, how transfers made before an application are treated, the look back period on a medicaid application, and planning tools such as trusts each run under their own rules and none of them are on this page. Transferring a house to avoid recovery has consequences of its own and frequently backfires. Whether a claim is valid, what it covers, and whether hardship applies are questions for a licensed Ohio attorney, and elder law is the specialism that handles them.
Sources for this section (2)
- ORC 5162.21 — Recovery from the estate of a person who received medicaid
- OAC 5160:1-2-07 — Medicaid estate recovery, including the delay while a spouse or certain residents survive
Legal information, not legal advice. Verified as of September 2026. Applying it to a particular situation is the work of a licensed Ohio attorney.