As with all Americans, the elderly are divorcing more frequently than in earlier decades. The rate of increase for the elderly, however, may actually be higher than among their children and grandchildren. Perhaps not surprisingly, the oldest old (those over age 70) are less likely to have ever been divorced than their younger colleagues, but the frequency of divorce now peaks at over 40% for those in their 50s.

By now it is common understanding that the aging of our population can be expected to increase the strain on already-strapped budgets for medical and personal care. The increase in divorces may exacerbate the problem, for a number of reasons.

Higher care needs for divorced seniors. Study after study indicates that unmarried individuals tend to be less healthy, to require more care, and to be more expensive to care for than their married counterparts. What is not clear is whether that is true because divorce negatively affects health, or because individuals in ill health are more likely to remain single and to divorce after marriage. The best guess is that the two factors are interrelated; more divorces, therefore, can be expected to increase the future cost of care for seniors.

Assistance from children. Another series of studies, largely undertaken at Johns Hopkins, demonstrate that adult children of divorced parents are less likely to provide personal care or financial assistance for those parents. Because family members now provide the majority of care for frail elders, any decrease in the availability of those family members can be expected to increase reliance on the public system, including Medicaid and other government-sponsored long-term care programs.

Impoverishment of divorced seniors. With recent changes in government benefit eligibility rules, elder law practitioners are seeing an increase in the number of divorces sought precisely to qualify an ill spouse for Medicaid eligibility.

Although a healthy spouse is permitted to keep the, personal possessions and up to about $100,000 in other assets, that will be insufficient to provide for the future needs of the survivor after the anticipated death of the ill spouse. The problem is especially acute if the ill spouse was the one who worked and built up retirement and Social Security benefits.

In such a case, the healthy spouse will probably see a significant decrease in available retirement income after the ill spouse’s death. Tragically, changes in eligibility rules have made divorce seem like a reasonable alternative in too many cases—despite the high emotional price associated with that decision.

It is important to note that divorce is not always the right approach to securing eligibility for public benefits. In fact, divorce will only infrequently make sense financially, and the emotional, personal and even financial cost of undertaking a divorce will often outweigh any benefit even then. Although a small portion of seniors will consider divorcing in connection with long term care costs, the frequency of divorce should be expected to rise faster among seniors than among their children and grandchildren in coming years, at least partly because of the changes in eligibility rules. That, in turn, could increase overall long term care costs—a presumably unintended consequence of the Congressional budget cutting undertaken in the past year.

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