Posted on 06/04/2009 8:33:58 AM PDT by InvisibleChurch
Did you know you could be responsible for your parents' unpaid bills? Thirty states currently have laws making adult children responsible for their parents if their parents can't afford to take care of themselves. While these laws are rarely enforced, there has been speculation that states may begin dusting them off as a way to save on Medicaid expenses, says SeniorJournal.com.
These laws, called filial responsibility laws, obligate adult children to provide necessities like food, clothing, housing, and medical attention for their indigent parents.
According to the National Center for Policy Analysis:
Twenty-one states allow a civil court action to obtain financial support or cost recovery. Twelve states impose criminal penalties on children who do not support their parents. Three states allow both civil and criminal actions. Generally, most states do not require children to provide care if they do not have the ability to pay. States vary on what factors they consider when determining whether an adult child has the ability to pay. Children may also not be required to support their parents if the parents abandoned them or did not support them.
The passage of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 made it more difficult to qualify for Medicaid, which means there may be more elderly individuals in nursing homes with no ability to pay for care. In response, nursing homes may use the filial responsibility laws as a way to get care paid for, says SeniorJournal.com.
Source: ElderLawAnswers.com, "States May Take New Look at Requiring Adult Children to Pay for Aging Parents; Boomers could get caught by laws already on books in thirty states," SeniorJournal.com, June 3, 2009.
For text:
http://www.seniorjournal.com/NEWS/Boomers/2009/20090603-StatesMayTake.htm
For more on State and Local Issues:
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=40
The government is doing it because they passed laws to take money away from us to do it. If they terminated those programs tomorrow we would revert back to the family taking care of family role we used to have.
Internal US tax policy has no effect on you. Trade policy, yes. Military policy, yes. But not how we do or do not take care of children or elderly. And claiming we ain’t doing God’s bidding (in your misguided view) is merely going to irritate.
are you talking to the guy with the caps lock key on? or me, who can’t be bothered to find the shift key in the first place? because, honestly, that one could go either way.
When Obama writes a check to his brother in Africa that lives on $1 per year and to his aunt in public housing near Boston, call me...
> But people who make no plans for retirement (or plan on letting the government care for them) get no sympathy from me.
Fair enough, except that is going to run into practical difficulties. The Baby Boom is coming thru the pipes (I just miss out on that, barely) and there is going to be a huge glut of old people who probably haven’t been provident, probably even thru their own stupid fault. They were, after all, the “Me” generation...
So, something has to be done with them. Here they are, all old and incontinent, and they’re unable to look after themselves, and they’ve spent all their money already on riotous living, being Prodigal Parents. Thousands of them. Hundreds of Thousands. Millions, even...
And they’ve got nothing, no resources to fall back on, no houses to sell (they reverse-mortgaged those years ago and have cruised around the world several times already — they had a blast! And they have the pictures to show for it, if you want to see — but nothing set aside. No insurance — they cashed that up years ago, spent it on parties and other stuff that they can’t remember. All gone.
This is our reality now, and it is only going to get worse, not better.
As Conservatives we are opposed to the practical solution — voluntary or involuntary euthanasia — and rightly so. And we probably do not have enough old folks homes to house them all.
So what are we going to do, in practical terms, with these people? Who should pay? The Gummint? What with?
Prodigal or no, parents who can’t pay probably become the responsibility of their children. No?
In the vast majority of cases, parents voluntarily had sex knowing that it could possibly lead to the creation of a child. They knew they might be legally responsible for caring for a child for 18+ years and that the child might have special needs, and they chose to accept that risk.
Children, on the other hand, do not choose to be born. They don't have any choice in who their parents will be or how their parents will live their lives. It isn't just for the government to FORCE children to be responsible for a situation they had no control over, even if the decent thing for the kids to do is to take responsibility anyway.
But again, if not them, then who? The rest of the taxpayers? And somebody will wind up picking up the tab, one way or the other.
> Internal US tax policy has no effect on you.
Does Internal US tax policy have an effect on you, your economy, and the US Dollar? If answer=yes then it affects every other country in the Western world. If answer=no then it doesn’t.
I’d guess answer=yes: you, your economy and the US dollar will inevitably be affected. Of course it will. I live in one of those countries that does catch the flu when you get the sniffles. Naturally I am concerned, and rightly so. I would be silly if I weren’t.
The Global Economy is a b!tch, ay.
> And claiming we aint doing Gods bidding (in your misguided view) is merely going to irritate.
Given that you are going to have a huge glut of elderly over the next 30+ years, it is inevitable that this will have an effect on your economy. So what do you propose is the right thing to do for them? Many of them will have been improvident — that is human nature.
You say my view is misguided: evidently God wouldn’t like you to look after your indigent and improvident elderly.
So who should?
+1. I have a good relationship with my parents and sister and I would never let any of them suffer but they've also been responsible savers and have done their best to try and save for their future.
But a friend of mine grew up dirt poor to wastrel parents who never saved a dime. He knocked himself out to become financial solvent. With this he'd be legally responsible for his parents bad money management and it would wipe him out.
That said, the state/feds shouldn't be paying for it either. People should be responsible for themselves.
An adult paying for the support of a minor child is a different story. The minor (by virtue of being a minor) is not capable of supporting themselves.
But adults being forced to pay for adults, no matter the relationship, is not right. The nature of being an adult is that you're supposed to be able to take care of yourself now and plan for your own future.
If this becomes law then parents will also be forced to pay for their irresponsible adult children no matter what the relationship. That too is wrong.
We need to start saying "Tough sh*t" to people when they don't take responsibility.
LQ
You should try it. Makes you look like an adult.
My kids have already threatened to make me and my ex/their mother share the same bedroom if they ever had to take us in a long way down the road.
> There are no easy solutions, but it just goes to prove (once again) that Socialism doesn’t work.
> I’m very afraid that the only way out is for our country to completely collapse, then be rebuilt from the ground up.
I think we probably see the same problem coming down the pipes, with no easy solution in sight.
We live in frightening times indeed.
***Hope they all like living together in our chicken coop!**
I had to chuckle at your comment...My son in law told me I would always have a place to live, cause he would clean out one of the horse stalls for me.>P?
I do love my son in law...he is my favorite. Of course he is my only S I L. The rest are all daughter in laws...
>>My kids have already threatened to make me and my ex/their mother share the same bedroom if they ever had to take us in a long way down the road.
That should be a real good incentive to save for your future LOL.
LQ
They said they’d tie our wheelchairs together.
so does not wetting your dress in public over things that you can't possibly control, like other people's grammar.
I agree and that is what I did. When my parents got the age where they needed someone close by we moved them from Oregon to California where we lived and got them a place about a mile away. A few years later they had to move in with us. After my mom passed away, I suddenly became the “sandwich” generation. My wife decided it wasn’t fun so I had custody of a 15 year old girl and my dad. It was some of the best times of my life! Can’t tell you how much I enjoyed having not only my daughter there but my dad. He didn’t require much care and his mind was sharp. He often said how much appreciated being with me but the gratitude was really the other way.
“LTC” = “long-term care”. It defrays the expenses for a nursing home or, in my case, in-home care that I had for my father during the five years that he was dying of Parkinson’s Disease. I would be absolutely bankrupt today if we hadn’t had it. Best investment you can possibly make.
Ideally, no one. We should fight against *any* government program that seeks to burden one person with another's obligations, not pick and choose which programs we like.
But we both know that’s just not going to happen. That ship sailed a long time ago.
Perhaps we should all take a look back at the history of social security, and consider the generational effects before we start blaming the “boomers”.
It started in the mid-30s, by Roosevelt, when the life span was much shorter, statistically. The boomers grew up in a time when their parents weren’t taxed that much for SS and Medicare, and they watched their parents benefit from their earning power going into the “Ponzi scheme”. Perhaps a few of them were astute enough to figure this out, but most just assumed it would work the same way for them.
Perhaps it would have, if they had produced the large families their parents had. But, you can never change just one thing, and the birth control pill came along in the early 60s, and no-one thought about the long term generational consequences of that!
So, as the benefits for the WW2 generation grew and grew, funded by the boomers, who had more and more of their paychecks taken for these. As a result, their ability to save and invest dropped dramatically. Then, increasing child care costs, college costs, housing costs, etc whacked the boomers right upside the head. Anyone remember the huge interest rates at the end of the 70s and into the 80s?
The boomers are now stuck. Their children, as a generation cannot afford to pay their social security/medicare costs the way they paid for the WW2s, and Silents. (We are in the latter, ‘39 and ‘43, with the first 2 children in the late boomer gang.)
I have advice for my children, but it isn’t the kind they want to hear. We should consider living the way our great-grands did, all under one roof, and pooling whatever resources are left after the .gov finishes messing us all up any more.
This generational catastrophe can be laid right back on Roosevelt and the dems that came after, in my “silent” opinion. They have destroyed the very fabric of our society, culture, communities, families, and charitable organizations. Our children and grandchildren will suffer mightily from all their “caring”.
I fear that they will not like where they end up when their time for judgement comes.
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