Many elderly households benefit from Medicaid, a means-tested, public health insurance program. Despite the increasing importance of Medicaid in the presence of an aging population and rising medical costs, very little is known about how Medicaid payments are distributed among the elderly and how the elderly value these payments. Which elderly households receive Medicaid transfers? How redistributive are these transfers and the taxes needed to finance them? What is the insurance value of these transfers? Is Medicaid of about the right size? How much would people lose if it were cut? These are important questions to answer before reforming the programs currently in place. In this paper we seek to fill this gap.We focus on single retirees, who comprise about 50 percent of people aged 70 or older and 70 percent of households aged 70 or older. We document new facts on Medicaid recipiency in the Assets and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old (AHEAD) data and show that, while the recipiency rate in the bottom income quintile is around 70 percent throughout retirement, the recipiency rate of higher-income