Baby Boomers in the US may be Responsible for Aging Parents Bills

Here is a problem we saw developing in the US.  With Baby Boomers aging and nursing home care costs climbing, obscure old sleeper laws on the books in more than half the states are coming back to haunt the adult children of seniors who can’t pay for their own care.  Lawyers are trying to change an obscure state law under the provocative bill title: “Stop Bankrupting Pennsylvanians Over Family Medical Bills” Act.  The law that lawyers are seeking to change is Pennsylvania’s “filial support” law–a concept dating to colonial days, with the current version written into state law in 1937.   It makes those with financial means legally responsible for nursing home, medical and other bills of destitute family members, including aging parents, adult children and a spouse.

“It can be a rude awakening for many people”.   More than half the states and Puerto Rico have such laws on the books, though most of them are referred to as “scarecrow” laws.  That means they’re rarely enforced but left in the state code as a warning—in this case, to those who might consider shirking familial responsibility, whether it’s helping to pay parents’ bills or providing hands on care themselves. (An estimated 42 million Americans, the largest group of them women in their 50s, but increasingly men and younger folks too, provide caregiving to aging relatives.)  Two significant Pennsylvania cases, combined with the rising costs of long term care nationwide and yawning gaps in coverage for that care, show that these scarecrow laws are turning into a live threat–and not just to Pennsylvanians.  The Keystone state’s law, which provides an exemption if your parents abandoned you for 10 years or more while you were a child–but no break for adult estrangement–gained new relevance in 2012.  That’s when the Pennsylvania Superior Court held John Pittas liable for his mother’s full $93,000 unpaid nursing home bill (resulting from a car accident), after she’d moved to Greece to live with two of her other children. In 2019, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that a Princeton, N.J. couple could be held liable for an unpaid $205,000 bill for the care of their severely disabled adult son at Melmark, a residential care facility in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.  (New Jersey had been paying the tab, but stopped paying because it wanted him moved to a cheaper New Jersey facility.  The couple wouldn’t have been liable under New Jersey law, but Pennsylvania’s high court decided it could hit the parents with Pennsylvania’s harsher rules.)  There’s no uniformity in the filial laws. While in Pennsylvania, the potential hit is wholly financial (including a possible lien on your property).  In some states failure to support a parent can be prosecuted as a criminal offense.  Massachusetts’ law, written in 1915, imposes a fine of up to $200 and a prison term of up to one year (or both) for “neglect or refusal to support a parent.”  Most adult children do undertake responsibilities for their parents as they age… They do this without laws obligating them to do so, thank goodness.