I obviously lost track of this thread because, for the life of me, I can't figure out why a bankruptcy lawyer would be the first step.
Oh well.
I think it went this way...
I brought up the opinion that the parents were essentially bankrupt and that bankruptcy was probably in their future, and the kids throwing good money after bad (paying the taxes on a house that would keep the parents in it through foreclosure) if they did that, so fiscally that wasn't a good idea.
AP went straight to "bankruptcy attorney".
Personally I'd have started at "gather all bills and make a spreadsheet of the assets and liabilities to figure out where and what it all is".
Mom and dad aren't going to do it, apparently. Sooner or later someone will have to do it. Might as well get on with it. Whether they like it or not.
And then later we got a trickle of further information that some of the siblings (AP perhaps) aren't local to mom and dad, so that makes it harder if the sibling that gives a crap isn't the closest one.
Really the tiny amount of information given is barely adequate to make suggestions about anything, let alone recommendations.
A fiscal pro, even just an accountant, with all the details in front of them, could make the assessment about what needs to be done with mom and pop's finances in about five minutes, once the spreadsheet is built, and build a budget. But so can any sibling with a spreadsheet. Heck, a ledger book and a pencil works too.
(Go old school with the green visor and the quill pen and play Eboneezer Scrooge if the role play makes it more entertaining. Haha. Might as well have fun with the fiscal disaster.)
The hard part is gathering up all of the bills and getting totals to put in the spreadsheet. And that's not THAT hard. Just tedious. And boring.
The other info that trickled out was that the family has "good genes" and both parents are expected to live a while.
Meaning, the original premise of APs post is sound, wondering if the siblings will be responsible for the massive debt, but there's significant work to straighten out mom and pop's finances anyway between then and now. The kid's responsibility to pay is down the road a bit. Right now the kids have to decide if they love mom and pop enough to fight them enough to get them to be responsible adults.
The question is: Will mom and pop allow the kids to help do that work.
Access to the checking account(s) online, if the bank has that feature and writing down where the dollars are going gets a list of creditors started, then seeing if there are unpaid bills lying around from others gets the vast majority of it. Wouldn't even have to be local if one can get online access to look at things and figure them all out.
I do hope this family doesn't play passive aggressive games like my wife's does. There's significant benefits being in a family that can just say, "you're being a dip****... Do you want my help or not?" and everyone will get over pretending to be "offended" and just fix the problem.
We've had to do that with two alcoholics in my family.
Essentially what mom and dad need is the exact same thing -- a financial intervention. "The whole family has decided that you're going to get your **** together before it costs the rest of us a whole lot of money."
Someone hanging tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt over your head, isn't the time to worry about politeness. It's a serious "WTF are you doing?!" moment.
Going to have to find out. No easy way out or around it. The parents, like teenagers, may not need to be legally made incompetent, but they may need to be monitored closely and given a fixed allowance. Heh. Life's a circle.
OK doesn't have them.
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Luckily both my parents are in good health and my sister and I get along pretty well, BUT things change quickly when money gets involved! I've seen friends and employees go through hell to try to keep their siblings from stealing everything! One guy's dad died and he and his wife had made out wills at the same time, basically giving their assets to the surviving spouse with some stuff to their respective kids. Well this guy's father told him where his UPDATED will was hidden before he died, which basically screwed his wife out of here own house! 
The kids repo'd the stepmom's car because it was in dad's name, they made her buy her house back, that she owned free and clear when they married! It was a mess, and I lost all respect for my employee and his evil sisters for treating their stepmom like that! 
in things financial. Anyway, siblings do not want to, cannot afford to, pay off Pop's debts. Still afraid of the consequences of intervention to their own financial welfare.