Don Grant is a Baby Boomer, nearly fifty years old, struggling to meet his monthly mortgage while paying off his daughter’s $100,000 in student loans. Last year, like so many other Americans, he lost his job, going months before finding work for less pay at a firm that sell foreclosures.

A month later, to add insult to injury, he found himself being sued by a Delaware County nursing home where his mother – with whom he had been estranged since childhood, having been raised by his grandparents – had racked up a $8,000 bill she refused to pay, the latest of a long string of debts racking up many thousands of dollars Diana Fichera has refused to pay. Under an archaic law dating back to Elizabethan England, the law can force adult children to pay for their parents’ medical care, even if they have the money and simply refuse to pay. Diana Fichera, who with a $1,434 monthly pension in addition a second pension and Social Security benefits, is better off financially than either her son or his half-sister, also dragged into the lawsuit. But pensions and Social Security are exempt from being garnished for debts – so the nursing home’s lawyers went after the children. Don Grant couldn’t afford even the $400 for a lawyer, so tried to represent himself against the full battery of the Blue Bell legal firm. Not surprisingly, he lost.

So now he is faced with a stark choice: Go into even further debt to pay his irresponsible mother’s medical bills, or ignore it, risking total financial collapse. "If I go to buy a car, it's going to affect my credit," he says. "If we try to sell the house, it will come up."

Continue reading »