1) The creditors are full of shit. Don't accept the estate, don't acknowledge that you owe any debt, and you don't owe them a damn thing. If no-one accepts it, they're simply screwed. They'll try to trick you into paying anyway, because they are, in fact, monsters, but they're full of shit.
2) Look up (online) the correct magic words to tell the creditors to go fuck themselves, or else face charges. They'll stop. On the off chance they don't, a call of complaint to your representative(s) or to the correct state agency will do the trick.
One notable, and very underreported exception, is Pennsylvania's filial responsibility law[1]. In Pennsylvania, if a resident of a nursing home is indigent, the liability falls statutorily on their family, who the home is free to sue and secure a judgement. This may not have gotten much attention due to uncommon use, but it's very real, and it's been upheld by the PA State Supreme Court. A handful of children of seniors have been bankrupted by filial responsibility judgements.
Yes, in fact the details vary some depending on which state you're in and how you're related to the deceased. In general, though, I'd treat unsolicited calls attempting to get you, personally, to pay for a dead relative's debts, as bullshit until you're 100% sure they're not. Most (all?) state governments have FAQs for this sort of thing online, and the federal government also offers guidance (all trivially Googleable).
The interesting part is how they're not applied. There are federal statutes that are more specific - and only two states have used these laws within the last 20 years.
There are only extreme corner cases where you need to worry about this.
No one needs to worry, until money gets tight. Then it's every man for himself, and the government will go after you. Or they will stiff the nursing home, and then let the nursing home go after you, like the what happened to the guy in Pennsylvania.
With the government budget situation in many places, and large amounts of people about to become elderly and rack up bills, I would consider it more than a remote possibility in the future.
I wish I'd been more aggressive about this when my mother in law died. She left behind a house, but also a half a million dollars worth of medical debt from a decade of chronic illness that eventually took her life. We thought "fine, we'll let the creditors fight over the house and be done with it", but they refused. They told us it was our responsibility to sell the house at at least market rate--which was hard because it had several decades of deferred maintenance. They would only take cash and refused to do any work for it beyond making threatening phone calls about garnishing our wages if we didn't get it done in time.
Since it was the state Medicaid office harassing us I really didn't want to get in a legal fight so we did all of the work of selling the house. Our lawyer did at least manage to get our costs taken out of the closing fees so we weren't out of pocket except for the time and effort and miles since we live in a different state. All in all I can't recommend having a loved one die.
The worst part is back when my mother in law got sick my wife convinced her to write us out of her will because we were told that the state would get the home anyway after her medical bills piled up. What she didn't tell us is that she just changed her will to name her church as the beneficiary. Once we read the will it became yet another mess to clean up. It should have been easy enough, we talked with the pastor and convinced him to refuse the estate easily enough. Unfortunately the church board overrode him (I think they believed we were trying to pull a fast one), and then found themselves in a fight with the state over a house they also had no intention of putting the effort into selling and also a huge medical debt. It was very tempting to just drop the thing and walk away at that point, but it was clear the problem would never be resolved and it would almost certainly come back to haunt us in the end. We had to do the work because nobody else was going to. I never did get a clear answer from the Medicaid debt collectors why they couldn't just put the estate up on a government auction. I think it would have required them to do some work and they really just didn't want to.
Personally, I would hire a lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction and specialty. Laws are complicated, and collections and court cases are very expensive if you happen to be wrong. The lawyer can help you reduce the amount if you happen to be responsible for part of it. The "magic words" will have much more power if they come from an practicing attorney.
Yeah this article is a bit dramatic. As evil as the rich people who try to recover debts may be, children are not legally responsible for their parent's debts.
That is so ridiculous. You can be born into this world without your decision or input. Your parents made that choice. Your parents can also choose to kick you out right at 18, after fulfilling their legal obligation.
Then, down the line, you can be held responsible for potentially even more than 18 years of more expensive care? Absolutely unfair.
Real life can be very dramatic and it doesn't make it less true to the people involved. Many people don't know to question the debtors, get overwhelmed, get bullied, and don't have the energy or resources to fight the onslaught of aggressive communications and serious looking mail they receive from these predators.
I was aware of filial support laws but it seems like they're only applied this aggressively in Pennsylvania? Generally they're used to keep children from looting grandma's bank account and then sending her to a nursing home on the government's dime--which seems reasonable to me.
1) The creditors are full of shit. Don't accept the estate, don't acknowledge that you owe any debt, and you don't owe them a damn thing. If no-one accepts it, they're simply screwed. They'll try to trick you into paying anyway, because they are, in fact, monsters, but they're full of shit.
2) Look up (online) the correct magic words to tell the creditors to go fuck themselves, or else face charges. They'll stop. On the off chance they don't, a call of complaint to your representative(s) or to the correct state agency will do the trick.