What happens to medical bills

jd1212

Sun, Jun 25 2023, 12:20 pm

Definitely not included in the life insurance above the amount of the death benefit you bought. If you bought a $2 million policy, that’s the amount the beneficiaries receive regardless of medical costs. Not sure about if the debts transfer.

amother

Watermelon

Sun, Jun 25 2023, 7:13 pm

It depends on what state and the specific situation. If you’re in this situation with a spouse cv”s it’s worthwhile to talk to a lawyer because there are a lot of intricacies regarding marital property, terms of ownership, etc.

Generally speaking, if there is no surviving spouse, the person’s estate would be held liable for the debts. Debts have to be paid before anything can go to heirs, so if the deceased had enough assets in their estate to pay their debt, that’s what would happen. If they owned a home, it’s possible the home would have to be sold to pay the debts.

If they have no assets and their estate is minimal, they would be considered insolvent and the debts would have to be eaten by the creditors. In this case, it is very difficult for creditors to hold surviving children responsible for their parents’ debts unless the children at some point co-signed or accepted responsibility for the debt.

Provided life insurance is paid to living, non-spouse beneficiaries who never co-signed, and not to the deceased’s estate, creditors can’t go after the payment. Again, if there’s a living spouse, this is much trickier and I can’t speak to that. Surviving spouses are often held liable for their deceased spouse’s debts, and it depends a lot on state laws and how the debts are structured.

amother

Narcissus

Sun, Jun 25 2023, 7:20 pm

Part of the process of closing out the estate is to publish that the person past away and anyone trying to collect a debt needs to contact whoever to claim. Once the estate is closed, they can't come after whoever inherited it. Typically, the medical billing process is pretty backlogged so they miss the window of opportunity to collect. It's not uncommon for someone to call to collect anyway but you can ignore or just send a death certificate because you aren't liable

amother

Dimgray

Sun, Jun 25 2023, 7:41 pm

I dealt extensively with my mother in law’s estate and I don’t remember any medical bills even though she was in and out of the hospital and rehab for a few months before she passed away. We needed to pay her taxes and some other things but not medical bills as far as I can recall. Also, she had a credit card bill of between 3 and 4 thousand dollars and when I called the credit card company to say that she had passed away, I’m pretty sure they said that we don’t need to pay. We used her estate to pay for her funeral, burial plot, headstone, pay the rabbi that officiated, pay for food for the Shloshim, pay her income taxes for the past ten years or so, pay property taxes, and also to get the estate through probate because she didn’t have a will. But I don’t recall medical bills.

Amarante

Sun, Jun 25 2023, 7:56 pm

There are some states that have so called filial responsibility laws and children are responsible for providing financial support to parents. Depends on state and generally they are not enforced

Should you fear ‘filial responsibility’ laws?

More than half of the states still have “filial responsibility” laws on the books that technically could require adult children to pay their impoverished parents’ bills, says estate and elder law attorney Letha McDowell of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

These laws are holdovers from a time when debtors prisons existed, says McDowell, who is president of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys. Their use has faded since the 1965 creation of Medicare — the health coverage program for people 65 and over — and Medicaid, the health coverage program for the poor.

Filial responsibility statutes are rarely enforced, although in 2012, a nursing home chain used Pennsylvania’s law to successfully sue a son for his mother’s $93,000 bill. Some legal experts have predicted more such lawsuits as long-term care costs rise, but so far that hasn’t materialized, McDowell says.