How COVID-19 Has Influenced Seniors to Change Their Living Wills
Kaiser Health News is reporting the coronavirus pandemic is prompting seniors to create or modify their living wills. Specifically, intubation is the topic that has many seniors crafting or rethinking their strategies amidst a wealth of disparate COVID-19 information that makes forming reliable conclusions for decision making, dubious at best. Ventilators
Why an Advanced Healthcare Directive is Important During COVID-19
In light of Coronavirus, a wrenching question especially demands an answer: if you or someone you love is taken down into life-threatening illness, how far would you want extreme life-prolonging measures to be tried? For us who are particularly vulnerable – seniors, those with compromised immune systems, those already struggling with
The Pitfalls of Adding Your Children to Bank Accounts
I want to leave my bank accounts to my children when I’m gone. Can’t I just make the children joint owners? That idea sounds better than it actually is. Yes, you would avoid court proceedings when you pass. But you’d put yourself at risk, at a time when you might need
How to Address Your Family’s Inheritance
Discussing wealth with children can be uncomfortable for many families. Talking about how much money or property you have is usually viewed as taboo. Asking someone else about what they have is often considered impolite. But failing to talk to kids about how much they may inherit could leave them
How Elder Law Attorneys Benefit Senior Citizens
Many aging Americans depend on family members or friends to help manage their financial, health, and other affairs during retirement and beyond. They often believe that their family members will be able to take care of any issues that arise. While consulting with loved ones about plans and wishes can
How Does Estate Planning Protect Your Family and Assets?
Estate planning may sound like the domain of the very wealthy, however, in the eyes of the law, an estate is simply the aggregate of property an individual owns, and most everyone owns something. Property ownership includes individual as well as jointly owned bank accounts, stocks and bonds, retirement accounts,
How Does Medicaid Impact Your Family’s Inheritance?
Mistakes can be made when it comes to inheritances and Medicaid. Those mistakes can be costly. When a person is drawing Medicaid benefits and inherits money or property, that inheritance jeopardizes the benefits. The inheritance must be handled carefully to minimize expensive penalties. What “careful” means, though, can be misunderstood
The Importance of Advanced Directives During a Crisis
During the Covid-19 epidemic, a wrenching question especially demands an answer: if you or someone you love is taken down into life-threatening illness, how far would you want extreme life-prolonging measures to be tried? For us who are particularly vulnerable – seniors, those with compromised immune systems, those already struggling with
How the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is Responding to Covid-19 in Nursing Homes
Nursing homes, one of the smallest population sets in the US, account for the largest demographic percentage of COVID-19 deaths. Statistics vary, but most accept that elder Americans in nursing homes account for at least 40 percent of all US coronavirus deaths. This tragic statistic is, in part, attributed to
Make Your Health Care Wishes Known: Artificial Nutrition or No?
By now, many of us have witnessed the slow and dehumanizing death by Alzheimer’s of friends and loved ones. In the final stages of this and other dementia diseases, there comes a time when the person can no longer speak, recognize loved ones, or move purposefully. With that poor quality of