CURRENT Social Security/Medicare recipients face financial ruin if Romney/Ryan get their way.
Even if they don't care what happens to their children's benefits, or the benefits of their younger siblings, friends, relatives, they will care about this issue because it directly affects all married couples over 65.
In Ryan's plan, married elderly people are at risk of losing EVERYTHING to a spouse's care. Romney/Ryan want to gut the protections that have, since the Reagan era, protected spouses from losing all the combined marital assets to the sick spouse's nursing home bills. Romney/Ryan would eliminate the Medicaid mandates that allow the well spouse to keep part of the couple's assets for him or herself.
If Romney/Ryan get their way, expect a rash of divorces -- with a legal division of marital assets -- among elderly people with disabled or sick spouses.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/243503-romney-ryan-plan-would-repeal-reagans-spousal-safety-net
Perhaps the greatest fear facing senior citizens and their children is that they will be stricken with a long-term illness that will destroy all of their savings. This is still a concern today, but it was a much greater concern 30 years ago until President Ronald Reagan stepped up to protect spouses from impoverishment. Now, the two Republicans atop the presidential ticket in 2012 want to gut those protections.
Here’s what’s at stake. Medicare covers doctor bills and hospital bills but it provides for only a short period of nursing home care. If a nursing home patient exhausts his or her own Medicare coverage and all of his or her personal resources, which happens to most Americans after a year or so in a nursing home, Medicaid will then cover the cost of the care. About one-third of all Medicaid payments are for long-term care.
But in the early 1980s, most if not all state Medicaid programs required a patient to deplete not only all of his or her resources but those of their spouse as well. If a wife or husband was in a nursing home, their combined savings and income were reduced to near poverty levels before the spouse could get Medicaid coverage. People who had worked and saved all of their lives were in many instances living on a budget that allowed little recreation, nothing more than a very frugal diet, and in some instances moving to substandard housing because of their spouse’s illness.
That changed in 1988 when President Reagan signed legislation that forced states to grant Medicaid coverage based on the financial condition of the patient and allowed the spouses of patients to protect enough assets and income to live with some degree of comfort and dignity.
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