Beware invalidating your custom Health Care Proxy with a generic one

Hospitals encourage patients to complete a Health Care Proxy upon arrival and tend to direct patients to complete one upon arrival in the emergency room. It’s wise to be wary of this edict. The generic form supplied by a hospital is basic and simple to complete; however, it does not necessarily cater to your specific circumstances and needs.

Admission to the hospital is not the appropriate time to consider terminal illness decisions, as your typical primary concern is a positive outcome of your hospitalization. As such, it is best to consider health care decisions in a less stressful situation.

A bigger problem comes in you have already executed a Health Care Proxy as part of your overall estate plan, and you then hastily fill-out and sign the hospital form. Execution of the new form revokes your prior Health Care Proxy, thereby stripping you of the carefully thought-out intentions provided for in the prior, now revoked document.

The best Health Care Proxies that address your concerns and intentions are not simply forms. They can address such issues as:

• Living Will Language: Whether or not you wish to be kept alive by machines in the event that independent physicians concur that you are in an irreversible coma or other terminal condition with no chance of recovery
• Organ Donation: Whether or not you wish to be an organ donor
• Creation or Burial: Whether or not you wish to be cremated or buried
• Burial Instructions: Where and how you wish to be buried
• Pain Control Preferences
• HIPPAA Release Language

Although the elderly contemplate execution of a Health Care Proxy more so than younger people, it is recommended for everyone over the age of 18. Eighty percent of those Americans who are in a persistent vegetative state are between the ages of 18 and 30 years old. The most appropriate time to draft and execute a Health Care Proxy is when you have time to reflect and consider your healthcare wishes.

An experienced estate planning attorney can provide you with the alternatives and options available to make the document suitable for your situation so that you do not have to rely on a statutory form filled-out under inordinate circumstances.


By: Todd C. Ratner, Esq.

Comments

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Ruth