This is jaw dropping. How is this legal at all?

It sounds like a good startup. Do background checks on homeless people, see if they have any living relatives, and if so you can house them in a nursing home and charge the relatives.

They're legal because they're laws. I think you might be asking how they're constitutional? They're constitutional because there's nothing in the constitution that prevents such laws.

Are they fair? I mean ... sometimes? These laws (supposedly) solved a problem where parents would bequeath their estate to their children prior the parents' death and, then, the children would leave their parents destitute. It's not clear how much of a problem this really was (think "19th century); it was probably just a popular image that politicians used as a talking point?

My suspicion is you'd need to use jury nullification to make the law "go away".

>In 2012, the media reported the case of John Pittas, whose mother had received care in a skilled nursing facility in Pennsylvania after an accident and then moved to Greece. The nursing home sued her son directly, before even trying to collect from Medicaid. A court in Pennsylvania ruled that the son must pay, according to the Pennsylvania filial responsibility law

That is literally inheriting debt. That should be illegal, yet almost half the country allows this.

It's mostly just Pennsylvania. There are something like 29 different states with some kind of filial support laws on the books, but Pennsylvania is the crazy one.

Woah. And what if you had a terrible relationship with these people? What if you worked your whole life to get the fuck away from them?

This reminds me of tobacco tax to pay for children’s healthcare initiative. As if the responsibility sits directly with cigarette smokers. It sits on all of us, not one person. Impoverished elderly people that need medical care should receive aid from the state indiscriminately where we all foot the bill.