Spending assets on long term care before qualifying for Medicaid.

Donald H. Taylor, Jr., Frank A. Sloan, & Edward C. Norton, Formation of Trusts and Spend Down on Medicaid, Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, Vol. 54B, No.4, S124-S201 (1999):

Medicaid requires elderly persons to deplet virtually all nonhousing wealth before financing nursing home care. The conventional wisdom is that persons enter a nursing home as a private-pay resident, spend virtually all of their nonhousing assets on such care, and then qualify for Medicaid, a process called spend down. However, empirical evidence indicates that this occurs less frequently than is often alleged (Norton, 1995; Sloan & Shayne, 1993).