by Anita Schnee, Attorney at Law
Powerful “power of attorney” (POA) documents are essential, if there ever comes a time when you or your elder become unable to manage your finances or make health-care decisions.
Beware if you rely only on POAs that hospitals provide, or that you have pulled off the Internet, or that you have got from other attorneys who do not focus their practice specifically on elder law. When an emergency arises, the bank or health-care provider may refuse to allow your agent to act – and then the only recourse is to go to court and get a guardianship. This is definitely not what you want to hear in an emergency.
We’ve written about a true story here, where an unfriendly family-member tried to take advantage of a helpless elder. The elder had no POA, the predator sued to get a guardianship, and it cost tremendous anxiety and expense to defend against that all-too-real threat.
This is why our POAs for financial and health-care matters total around fifty pages. We will even custom-draft a POA for specific health-care challenges, to direct the particular kind of health care needed.
A client came in recently with a health-care POA from another state. She wanted know whether it would do the job for her father. We said emphatically “no.”
– The document failed to specify the kind of health care the father would want; and
– It failed to comply with our state law, meaning that it likely wouldn’t work here; and
– It failed to protect the father’s agent from liability for a bad decision; and
– It failed to provide the agent with access to essential medical records; and
– It even failed to designate who should serve as an agent!
Our health-care documents do much, much more than that. And our financial POAs are so meticulous that we’ll cite just one example: We provide over two pages of detail covering real-estate transactions alone. For more on the financial POAs, download our free brochure here.
