Cleveland        For all the talk about American generational wealth and the huge wealth transfer many have predicted will come as baby boomers pass on, for many it has become clear that the cost of aging and dying has not been fully accounted for in these morbid, but rosy, calculations.  With no national health insurance program that fully supports aging, the cost of medical care from hospitals to nursing homes to prescription drugs continues to soar past any inflation measure.

The Washington Post recently looked at all of this and it should be sobering to both the old and the young hopefuls.  Using data from the national Health and Retirement Study,

The Post focused on those who died between 2006 and 2022, totaling what they spent out of pocket on care in their final decade and assessing the impact in terms of categories of wealth.  The analysis found that the median American spent $19,179. One in 6 spent more than $50,000. One in 20 spent more than $100,000.

You might think you can duck the bullet, but the data is discouraging about your chances.  Post reporters found…

The share of people left with nothing after paying for elder care rose from 6 percent among those who died between 2006 and 2010 to nearly 11 percent among those who died between 2017 and 2022. The costs fell hardest on those with the least: Among the poorest fifth of Americans in the analysis, 41 percent were left with nothing after accounting for their care costs in the years before death. Overall, this group spent nearly a third of their wealth on out-of-pocket care costs in the last decade of their lives — more than 20 times the share spent by the wealthiest fifth.

For the percentage of seniors – and their families – where parents have drawn the short straw and ended up with dementia and are housed in assisted living, the story is even bleaker.

Nationally, the median cost of a private room and basic services was about $74,400 a year in 2025, according to a CareScout Cost of Care Survey. For those who need the more extensive services of a nursing home, the annual median cost was $129,575 for a private room. Seven years of that for someone with dementia, and the bills would add up to nearly $1 million.

None of us need to be mathematical geniuses to start figuring that if your family has to drop a million here and there for elderly caregiving, family wealth needs to be nearly stratospheric not to significantly decrease the chances of providing a generational leg up for descendants.  What a sad story, both coming and going, right?

For all the talk about Social Security as the elderly life raft, and whether it is secure or imperiled by everything from the birthrate to immigration to earlier triggering ages, the lack of a truly public and governmental system adequate for everyone’s health care needs in the US, but especially for the huge costs of the last years of aging, is a rolling tragedy.  Getting older is the goal.  Long life should be a win, not a struggle and a tragedy.  A family’s mission is care for their elderly and their children, and there should not be a tradeoff between the two, but with escalating costs and no effective regulatory or government breaker switches, we’re all swimming in a toxic stew.  No surprise that polls are increasingly reporting that Americans aren’t happy with the way things are going or a president that has blatantly said that he doesn’t care about their finances, while he pads his own accounts lavishly.