health care proxy Tag

Could this be you? You’re in your thirties or forties, with several active children and a busy social and business life. You’ve got volunteer activities and school programs to keep track of. Your parents are in their seventies or eighties, have their own home, and appear to pay all their bills when due. You have no idea what your parents’ income or assets are because they don’t want to bother...

IT’S SPRING CLEANING TIME! DUST OFF YOUR OLD ESTATE PLAN   Spring time is when people often take a look around and start freshening things up. Home repairs, paint jobs, new furniture, new clothes, maybe a different haircut…… there’s something about seeing the new buds on trees and the blooming daffodils that gets us thinking this way. It’s the perfect time to pull out your old estate plan...

Advocating for our clients in nursing homes during this pandemic has been uniquely difficult! What tools do we still have to help people watch over the delivery of care to their loved ones? Many rights are guaranteed, and right now much creativity is needed to protect those rights. You can still set up care plan conferences with the treatment team...

Are you in a long-term relationship, or even engaged to be married? Is that wedding postponed indefinitely due to the current pandemic? Do you have children who would need a guardian if you pass away? Do you have children from a previous relationship? Do you want to make sure that your partner is the one who will inherit your estate, or will be the one who’s allowed to handle your...

Once a person turns 18, s/he is presumed competent in the eyes of the law and their parents are no longer actually authorized to sign documents for them. This can create a vacuum especially if the parents have generally been managing everything for this young adult. At the other end of the spectrum, older adults may not have anybody who actually has any legal authority to handle things for...

On April 12th, New Jersey joined seven other States which have enacted laws authorizing a terminally patient to self-ingest a drug that would end their life. Oregon was the first State to allow this, in 1997. The New Jersey bill was A1504/S1072. It will go into effect on August 1, 2018. Over two dozen other States are actively considering such legislation. The Act specifies criteria for who is...

I had the opportunity today to read a very thoughtful article about a meeting of Catholic physicians who are helping their very ill patients to wrestle with hard decisions about whether to utilize palliative care in place of active treatment with mechanical life support. The organization is the Catholic Health Association of the United States (CHA) and the online newsletter article in the...

DRAFT   MUST REWRITE    text from daily briefingHEALTH CARE LAW New Jersey has a Charity Care program which pays for hospital care for uninsured individuals who meet the stringent income and asset requirements and also file an application. If an eligible individual enters the hospital as an emergency room admission, the hospital is required to prepare and submit the application and to take...

Today I had the great fortune to participate in a case in which a person who has been under guardianship for six years had their capacity restored in full.  This kind of situation doesn’t often happen, but it’s really fabulous. This case started in 2010 when the parent and sibling came to me in an emergency to report that their loved one who I’ll call “X” had...

If you are the Guardian of the Person or the designated Health Care Representative for a person who is extremely mentally incapacitated, there may come a time that you may face that most dreadful of decisions. You may wonder whether to treat all new medical crises. The person you are responsible for may have advanced Alzheimers or other dementia, may be incapable of expressing themselves, or...