## Facts

- Ida Betzes, about 90 years old, was found incapacitated due to old age, and her daughters, Phyllis Marcus and Selma Anderson, were appointed conservators of her estate.
- At the time of appointment, Betzes had nearly $600,000 in assets plus additional income for her support.
- Between 1976 and 1979, the conservators made substantial inter vivos gifts from Betzes’s assets to themselves and other family members, transferring nearly all of her assets to descendants.
- After the transfers reduced the estate to a level consistent with Medicaid resource limits, Marcus applied for Medicaid benefits on Betzes’s behalf.
- The Department of Human Resources appeared in Probate Court as an interested party and petitioned for an accounting.
- The Probate Court disallowed the gifts, concluding that Connecticut law did not authorize conservators to make gratuitous transfers, and treated the transferred funds as remaining in the conservatorship estate.
- Relying on the probate ruling, the Department of Income Maintenance denied Medicaid, treating the disallowed gift funds as actually available resources.
- The conservators appealed both the probate decree and the Medicaid fair-hearing decision; the Superior Court dismissed both appeals, and the Connecticut Supreme Court affirmed.

## Issues

1. Whether Connecticut conservators (and the Probate Court) had authority, absent express statutory authorization, to make or approve substantial gratuitous transfers from an incompetent person’s estate.
2. Whether, pending appeal from a probate decree disallowing such gifts, the disallowed funds could be treated as actually available resources for Medicaid eligibility.
3. Whether enforcing state probate protections that invalidate a conservator’s gifts is incompatible with federal Medicaid law.

## Decision

- The Connecticut Supreme Court affirmed the Superior Court’s dismissals and found no error.
- The court held the Probate Court lacked jurisdiction to allow the gifts because conservators had no statutory authority to make them, and such power could not be implied as necessary or incidental to enumerated conservator duties.
- The court upheld the Medicaid denial because the probate decree disallowing the gifts remained in full force pending appeal, making the transferred funds actually available to Betzes for eligibility purposes.
- The court rejected the claim that federal Medicaid law required the agency to ignore the probate decree or invalidated the state probate rules at issue.

## Legal Principles

- A conservator’s powers are limited to those granted by statute and those reasonably implied as necessary or incidental to express statutory duties; substantial gratuitous transfers are not implied within ordinary estate-preservation and management authority.
- A substituted-judgment rationale cannot expand a conservator’s authority beyond statutory limits where the effect is to deplete the ward’s estate for the benefit of others.
- A probate decree disallowing gifts from a conservatorship estate remains operative unless stayed or reversed; an administrative agency may treat property governed by that decree as available when applying eligibility rules.
- State probate laws aimed at protecting an incompetent person’s estate are not preempted merely because their application affects Medicaid eligibility; such laws may coexist with federal Medicaid standards when their essential purpose is estate protection rather than eligibility restriction.

## Conclusion

The court held that, under the conservator statute in effect when the transfers were made, conservators lacked implied authority to give away a ward’s assets, and a probate decree disallowing such gifts remained effective pending appeal, permitting Medicaid officials to treat the transferred funds as actually available resources and deny benefits.


Marcus’ Appeal from Probate v. Dep’t of Human Res., 199 Conn. 524, 509 A.2d 1 (1986)