Where Do You Stand Under the Filial Responsibility Law?

In the field of Asset Protection there is often the question of “should children be responsible for the care of their parents?” This is called filial responsibility. For example, your parent has been a victim of a car accident and has become a patient of a nursing home. After her discharge, she was billed somewhere around $90,000. If your parent could not pay the bill, should you pay for it? One instance is if the court system would favor the nursing home, would you be liable to pay such amount under the filial responsibility that states that a child should become responsible of supporting his parents if you have the capability to pay?

So, what would happen if your parents would need long-term care but could not afford to pay? About 30 states implement the filial responsibility law that can be used by long-term care facilities including nursing homes. They would have the right to collect any unpaid amounts from the parents’ children. Under the law, adult children are responsible to support their parents for needs – including clothing, food, shelter and even medical care for any indigent parent. Although such laws are not put into practice in many states, the same could happen to you. A nursing home may collect any unpaid bills incurred by your parent in their facility.

If you would want to avoid such pitfalls that you may encounter, you can check out our next section. Being a personal asset protection specialist, I understand that Medicare may include short-term rehabilitation in a nursing home under specific conditions, but such should only last for about 100 days. Therefore, if your parent does not have long-term care insurance, he should pay for his own care unless they closely looked into and done estate planning in California. You should have this if you don’t want to be covered by the Filial Responsibility Law.

Through the years I’ve met such situations at the Asset Protection Center. Within this period, we have helped children and their parents go through this complicated and often very stressful event for adult children to shoulder their parent’s nursing home bills under the Filial Responsibility Law. I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ll see you next time!