How much can and should children pay for their elderly parents' care?

Jane Gross, the blogger of the amazing New York Times' "The New Old Age," shares her experience and other good information about adult children's responsibilities for their parents' long-term care. Some thirty states even make adult children legally responsible for such support.

Here is an excerpt from Adult Children, Aging Parents and the Law:

At the end of my mother’s life, for six months, a year at most, Medicaid paid for her care in a nursing home. She was broke by then, after living on a pittance since she was widowed at 58, using the proceeds from her house to pay for six years of assisted living and part of her nursing home stay and never seeing a penny from a long-term care insurance policy that cost a bundle but covered none of what she needed. She had given my brother and me no up-front money to hasten her eligibility for Medicaid and died with $26 to her name and nothing to leave to her children. The good news was we didn’t even have to put her will in probate.

. . .

I sometimes wondered why adult children weren’t legally responsible for their parents’ financial support, assuming they had money in the bank. Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t want to pay for her $14,000-a-month (yes, $14,000) nursing home bill. But I could have, if truth be told, at least for a while.

(Photo by makelessnoise; used by permission.)