I think you are mistaken when you suggest that the elderly aren't also abandoned by their families here in the US. In my experience, most immigrant people see it as expected behavior that they should move their parents into their house when they get too old to live alone. But a large proportion of native-born Americans do not see it that way. I'm a middle class American white guy married to a Cuban-American. We took my mother in when she got too old to live in her own apartment. But this was at my wife's suggestion--I'm not sure it would have occurred to me, at least not so soon. My mother's presence in the household frequently evokes surprise from both native-born Americans and foreign-born Americans who are surprised to see an American old person living with one of her children. An Indian guy who came to draw blood from her a couple of times actually took my hand and said with visible emotion how great it was to see an American do this. It made me ashamed that this would be seen as remarkable by someone who still has roots elsewhere. It opened my eyes to a streak of coldness in our society that goes beyond this. It's of a piece with our inexplicable refusal to have the kind of socialized medicine that it present in every other advanced economy and our reflexive mass jailing of millions of people, sending women back to work immediately after childbirth, etc. Something is definitely wrong here and I don't know what it is.