How Estate Planning Can Help Your Loved Ones Thrive Through A Crisis

Crisis? What Crisis?

In California, public service announcements often encourage us to prepare for emergencies such as earthquakes – we are urged to nominate an out-of-state friend for all our family members to pass telephone messages through; our children go through earthquake drills at school where they are equipped with a first aid kit, a blanket and comforting photos of the family pets.

In reality, far more Californians are affected everyday by road traffic accidents, strokes or other personal misfortunes than by earthquakes. What crisis plans do you have for your loved ones in the event of your untimely death or incapacity? What plan will maximize your chance of being well cared for after a serious injury?

Estate Plans as Emergency Survival Kits

An estate plan is your emergency survival kit. It contains documents which work together, easing you and your loved ones into a better future.

None of us can know the nature of future crises, but the legal documents in an estate plan are the best tools the law has devised for covering many of the unexpectedly grim situations faced by families every day. These documents must be in place before the emergency arises – when you still have time to think through the best options available and you have the legal capacity to ensure the documents take effect. Tackling emergencies proactively and in advance maximizes the chances of a good outcome. Waiting for emergencies to arise and having to react, unprepared, in unnerving circumstances invites largely avoidable heartache. Once you no longer have legal capacity, for example because of a serious blow to the head, it is too late to create these documents.

In this article we focus on one of the most important documents - an advance healthcare directive.

Advance Healthcare Directive

Many road traffic accidents are not fatal, but result in serious injuries. A “living will” or advance healthcare directive directs doctors to cooperate with a person of your choosing (your “healthcare agent”) in deciding what care you should receive in the event you are unable to decide yourself. You need to choose this healthcare agent wisely – it should probably be someone who lives near you or a close family member, someone who will be assertive but calm and polite under stress, someone who will listen carefully and intelligently to emergency room doctors and be able to process information quickly and cooperate with them. You are not appointing someone to second guess medical professionals. Without an advance healthcare directive, your family members, who may know your intentions, will have little input with regards to your care. You will have no-one to advocate for you in, potentially, an extremely busy hospital waiting room.

If you are responsible for young adults, it is vitally important to urge them to sign an advance healthcare directive so that doctors will communicate openly with you and take what you say seriously. Once a child is eighteen years old, doctor-patient confidentiality kicks in. You may still be paying the medical bills, but you will not be able to advocate for your child as you may be used to doing without an advance healthcare directive.

Advance healthcare directives are equally important when you or someone you love suffers from a serious stroke or dementia. A copy of the advance healthcare directive should be given to each person's primary care physician. It should then become available to any ER or specialist doctor, as needed.

Your advance healthcare directive also determines whether you will be kept alive on a ventilator even if there is little or no chance of recovery. It is very important to make this decision in advance to avoid placing a traumatic burden on family members in an already stressful situation. The California Medical Association provides a wording which can be included in an advance healthcare directive, instructing doctors to "pull the plug" in a legally permissible manner, once there is no reasonable hope of recovery. Post death instructions are sometimes included in an advance healthcare directive, such as funeral instructions or anatomical gifts. All of these issues present such personal choices that we must each grapple with them for ourselves, rather than leave it to someone else to take responsibility.

Creating an advance healthcare directive is a very important step in fulfilling our responsibility to our loved ones. Ensuring the seniors and the young adults in our lives have also created advance healthcare directives is equally important to our peace of mind.

-- Attorney Elizabeth Botsford practices mobile estate planning in the Greater Los Angeles area, visiting homes, offices and hospital beds. Please visit busywills.com to learn more about Busy Wills, Inc.’s transparent, fixed fee, good value pricing.

-- To learn more about how powers of attorney can help you and your family thrive through crises, buy your copy of Attorney Botsford’s in-depth, conversational style guide ‘Powers of Attorney 2018’ now on Amazon at http://a.co/46FRs8n.

DISCLAIMER: This article is for informational purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship between you and the author. No recipients of content from this article should act or refrain from acting on the basis of content of the article without seeking appropriate legal advice or other professional counseling.