Pay Your Parents' Bills or Else

[Franzia]

Source: ABC News


Pay Your Parents' Bills or Else
Little-Known State Laws Force Some to Pay Their Parents' Nursing Home Bills


Could you be sued for your parents' unpaid health care bills? It happened to Andrea August.

One spring day, the 39-year-old Pennsylvania woman was stunned to learn that a nursing home was suing her for more than $300,000 in unpaid bills related to her father, who died after spending about a year in the home, and her mother, a dementia patient still living there.

"I was devastated," August said. "We're living basically paycheck to paycheck. We don't try to live beyond our means -- it was just unbelievable that all of a sudden there was this debt hanging over us."

August said that both she and her husband work two jobs each to make ends meet for themselves and their two children. She loves her parents, she said, and did what she could to help them. But footing their bills was out of the question.

MORE