If you're not incredibly rich, you're just temporarily holding all your savings & retirement accounts for the hospitals and nursing homes that'll eventually take all of it. And then some.
Yep the entire end-of-life industry is incentivized to drain all the wealth from the old and terminally ill before they die. That is why my plan is to opt out. DNR, living will, I will not enter a care facility or hospital I'd rather die on my own terms and have my children inherit whatever I have managed to accumulate.
You can file bankruptcy which will protect your retirement accounts. There are other way to protect your assets and money as you get older and risk gets higher.
It should not be this way though because mostly the wealthy take advantage of protecting their assets as it requires some money.
Was your uncle qualified for medicare? We recently had several members need end of life care and they didn't have to pay any of the hospital bills. Many bills we did receive, we called the charging company and they were waived immediately "oh I guess we made a $100K mistake" or "medicare already reimbursed us, that was just a courtesy notice."
Honestly, I am not sure. I wasn't well versed in personal finance/healthcare/money back then. He destroyed his family and his wife left him. His kids don't really want to discuss that period of their life at all, so we never talk about it.