Probate of Marcus

Ida Betzes was a 90-year-old woman who was incapacitated due to old age. A Connecticut probate court appointed Betzes’s daughters, Phyllis Marcus (plaintiff) and Selma Anderson (plaintiff), as Betzes’s conservators. At the time, Betzes had nearly $600,000 in assets as well as additional income for her support. Between 1976 and 1979, Marcus and Anderson gave away nearly all of Betzes’s assets to Betzes’s children and grandchildren. Once Betzes’s assets were below the threshold for Medicaid eligibility, Marcus applied to the department of income maintenance for Medicaid on Betzes’s behalf. The department of human resources, after learning of the gifts that had depleted Betzes’s assets, filed a petition in probate court as an interested party for an accounting of Betzes’s estate. Following a hearing, the probate court disallowed the gifts because Connecticut law did not give conservators the power to make gifts. The department of income maintenance then denied Marcus’s application for Medicaid, reasoning that if the gifts were disallowed, then Betzes no longer qualified for Medicaid benefits. Marcus and Anderson appealed, arguing that the gifts were authorized under Connecticut law and that the doctrine of substituted judgment applied. Marcus and Anderson further argued that because federal law at the time of the transfers invalidated transfer-of-assets restrictions on Medicaid eligibility, Betzes would have qualified for Medicaid benefits if she had made the gifts herself.