I've seen some interesting discussions on this board related to adult skids and their opinions about parents' money and/or future inheritance. Here's a recent story that may be food for thought. Every situation is different, of course, but this particular lawsuit takes parents, adult kids, and money into a whole new realm! Add in stepparents and whether that falls under definition of "parent" and it gets REAL interesting. Maybe that adult skid who hates you now may have to pay for your nursing home care later!

"Son Hit With Aging Parent's $93K Nursing Home Bill"

You typically can't be held responsible for your parents' debts. The exception may be if the debt is a whopping nursing-home bill.

Pennsylvania's Superior Court recently ruled that a nursing home in that state could go after the son of an elderly woman who had left the country owing a $93,000 bill for a six-month stay.

Health Care & Retirement Corporation of America pursued the son, a 47-year-old restaurant owner named John Pittas, under the state's "filial responsibility" law. Twenty-eight other states and Puerto Rico have similar laws, which create a legal duty for children to financially support indigent parents.

According to Katherine Pearson of Penn State's Dickinson School of Law, the states with filial-responsibility laws are: Alaska, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia.

In most states, the laws are seldom enforced. Filial-responsibility codes date from colonial times in America and, even before that, to the "poor laws" of the Elizabethan era in England, Pearson said. After the advent of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which prevented seniors from falling into abject poverty, some states repealed their laws, and others stopped enforcing what remained on the books.

"What we've seen is that family members who can support each other, do support each other," Pearson said, "unless there's a strong personal reason why you don't."

When there has been enforcement in the recent past, it typically was because an adult child had defrauded the parent or was otherwise at fault in creating the parent's poverty.

That wasn't the case with Pittas, and elder-law attorneys are concerned that the court's ruling could encourage other nursing homes to sue family members for unpaid bills. Some worry that increasingly strapped states might use the laws to get reimbursement for custodial care.

"Just because they haven't done so yet doesn't mean that they won't," said elder-law attorney Michael Amoruso, a past president of the New York chapter of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys. "All the states are struggling for money."