Pay Your Parents' Bills or Else

July 15, 2009— -- 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.

"I don't think anybody should be responsible for someone else's bill," she said. "You can only do so much."

August found herself among a growing number of adult children facing legal pressure to pay their parents' medical bills.

In recent years, nursing homes in Pennsylvania have filed numerous lawsuits against the grown children of patients with unpaid bills under a little-known law that requires adult children to support destitute parents. Similar cases have also arisen in South Dakota.

The law is based on a concept known as "filial support" or "filial responsibility" -- the term often used to describe an adult child's obligation to a parent. The idea that adult children should be held legally responsible for their parents' welfare dates back to 17th-century England and carried over to colonial America.

Today, some form of filial support law remains on the books in 30 states but, according to Katherine Pearson, a law professor at Penn State and an expert on elder law, only Pennsylvania and South Dakota have recent track records of health care providers using the law to sue patients' children. It's unclear whether nursing facilities in other states will ever employ the law in a similar fashion.