One of my elderly Aunts (who has no children) has had to move into a Nursing Home. She was frugal all of her life and saved her money. She has to pay her way in the Nursing Home, until she has no more money, at which time the State will pay. Many of the people in the Nursing Home had no savings, so the state has paid for them from the beginning. It appears it would have been a better strategy for my Aunt to have lived it up while she was young rather than saving for her old age. This is an interesting dilemma because the state needs people to save money, but saving money is a sucker play in our society unless you can accumulate many millions of dollars. When my son Brad was a teen-ager he told me he had figured out that in America you need to either have a lot of money, or have none at all so the state would be responsible for caring for you.