The following is for Medicare, not Medicaid. (For Medicaid in PA, you have to have practically nothing. You may be able to keep a house and car. Whether a lien is put on it for later, I don't know) In PA We came close to running out of Medicare paid home care in just a couple of months for my husband. We had a health aide 3 days a week at 1 hour per day and visiting nurse either once a week or every 2 weeks - I forget. This is not much home care, but it was enough to help and we were still running out of paid home care. He got that because of a hospitalization. Medicare allows home care or nursing home, if deemed necessary, for a certain amount of time after a hospital stay and that's it. Medicare does not allow for "custodial care" for, as far as I know, either home care or nursing home. Custodial care is basically home care or nursing home for a person who does not have an acute medical problem. In other words they don't cover for long term medical problems. My mother-in-law was in a nursing home. She passed away before all her money was spent, but since the house was in her name and my husband's (mother and son, not husband and wife) my understanding was that the house could be sold "from under us" for the money from her half of the house to pay her nursing home. (To keep the house we would have had to buy her half.) My mother is 94, my father 88. She has been doing all right, mentally alert, but is getting "wobbly". He had a stroke, is mentally fit, but in bed. They got some home care paid by Medicare but have been having to pay most of it themselves, since neither of them had been hospitalized for several years. My mother was hospitalized for several days recently and she got some home care, but it was for her, not my father since she was the one hospitalized. This is a major problem. My husband's visiting nurses had to keep trying to defend our visits to the insurance company and then to Medicare, but there is definitely a limit. Not much home care (or nursing home) is allowed and it is very much needed. I also could find no financial help to pay for prescriptions. PA has a prescription plan called PACE. We might have just squeaked in on income, but he was not 65, so was not eligible. We did manage to get the cost from $900/month to $300/month using generic drugs, which was still a large expense for us. We're your average middle class, who have too much to get financial help for anything, but really cannot afford to pay for it. Marge Green [log in to unmask]