May 28, 2020
By: Deborah Childress
State of Florida Attorney General, Ashley Moody, is very displeased with unscrupulous activity involving seizures of Medicaid patients’ COVID-19 stimulus checks by nursing homes and assisted living facilities. She issued a “Consumer Alert for Floridians with loved ones in nursing homes or assisted living facilities.”
On MyFloridaLegal.com, she declared, “This is disgraceful and completely unacceptable. As we have seen throughout this crisis, residents in these facilities are at a higher risk of suffering and dying from COVID-19. They should not have to carry the additional burden of worrying about their stimulus money being taken by those entrusted with their care…If these stimulus funds were meant for facility operators, they would have been earmarked as such.”
The CARES Act, which approved all COVID-19 stimulus checks issued to the American people, indicates these checks are actually “tax credits,” meaning, they are not considered resources for Federal benefits programs, like Medicaid. The text of this portion of the CARES Act can be found by Googling 26 U.S.C. 6409. According to govinfo.gov, this law went into effect January 3, 2016 under the Internal Revenue Code, Title 26. It was added to the CARES Act in 2019.
No further information is available at this time through the Florida Attorney General’s Office, due to ongoing investigations.