Healthcare's "massive transfer of wealth"

Here are excerpts from one family's story about the financial aspects of end-of-life-related healthcare:

My aunt, aged 94, died last week. In and of itself, there is nothing remarkable in this statement, except for the fact that she died a pauper and on medical assistance as a ward of the state of Minnesota...

My aunt and her husband, who died in 1985, were hardworking Americans. The children of Polish immigrants, they tried to live by the rules. Combined, they worked for a total of 80 years in a variety of low-level, white-collar jobs. If they collectively earned $30,000 in any given year, that would have been a lot.

Yet, somehow, my aunt managed to save more than $250,000. She also received small pensions from the Teamsters Union and the state of California, along with Social Security and a tiny private annuity. In the last decade of her life, her monthly income amounted to about $1,500...

But when she fell ill and had to be placed in assisted living, and finally in a nursing home, her financial fate was sealed. Although she had Medicare and Medicare supplemental insurance, neither of these covered the costs of long-term care. Her savings were now at risk, at a rate of $60,000 a year...

In the end, she spent everything she had to qualify for Medicaid in Minnesota, which she was on for the last year of her life. This diligent, responsible American woman was pauperized simply because she had the indecency to get terminally ill...

Though I have not been able to find statistics on the subject, I am certain that there will be a massive transfer of wealth over the next two or three decades, amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars or more, from people just like my aunt to health insurers and health care providers...

This week, I was about to close out her checking account in the amount of $215, the sum total of her wealth. But I received, in the mail, a bill from a heath care provider in the amount of $220. Neither Medicare nor her supplemental insurer will pay it, because it is an unspecified "service not covered."

More details of the story at the StarTribune.  Of course, it's just one family's story.  Repeated hundreds of thousands of times across the country.

My own mother, age 94, has asked me, "when the time comes" to "put her down."