New Surrogate Decision Making Law in NH

New Hampshire now has a law that allows surrogate decision making with respect to health care issues.

The purpose of the law is to ensure that health care decisions can be made in a timely manner by a person’s next of kin or loved one without involving court action. 

Basically, the new law establishes a surrogate decision maker for health care decisions when there is no valid advanced directive or guardian in place.

There are some additional things to think about with respect to the legislation as well, which you can review in our recent newsletter.

The Advantages of a Revocable Trust

People often ask about the advantage of a revocable trust for probate avoidance.

There are several advantages. For example, when it is established and properly funded, it ensures a consistent estate plan. Too often, when people rely on designated beneficiaries and joint ownership, the result is a plan that is skewed unintentionally toward one or another beneficiary. The reason for this is that if you have multiple beneficiary designations, and you change one but forgot to change the others, you may create a different distribution than the one you had in mind. 

By contrast, with a revocable trust, the change can be made once (by means of an amendment to the trust) and this will affect all assets.

Read more: http://www.curtinlawoffice.com/typical-questions.htm

New Surrogate Decision Making Law in NH Part 2: Be Proactive

In our previous post we summarized the details associated with a new surrogate decision-making law in NH.

This new law is helpful because it does provide for an alternative, other than court, to family members and friends of a loved one who has not executed his or her health care power of attorney.

Nonetheless, the best option is being proactive. 

Being proactive means executing a health care power of attorney when you are competent, in which you choose the agent (s), you want to act on your behalf when you are no longer able to make health care decisions for yourself. 

New Surrogate Decision Making Law in NH

New Hampshire now has a law that allows surrogate decision making with respect to health care issues.

The purpose of the law is to ensure that health care decisions can be made in a timely manner by a person’s next of kin or loved one without involving court action. Basically, the new law establishes a surrogate decision maker for health care decisions when there is no valid advanced directive or guardian in place.

There are some things to think about with respect to the legislation.

• When choosing a surrogate decision maker, the physician or APRN must follow a certain priority list. Your choice for a health care agent to make health care decisions for you may be different than the person on top of the priority list.
• It should also be noted that if your children are the surrogate decision makers and they can’t agree, then the majority of them who do agree rule. However, if one of them initiates a guardianship, then none of your children will be recognized as a decision maker for you.
• Also, the authority of the surrogate decision maker terminates after 90 days. The law doesn’t say what happens after that…

Elder Law Summary

People often ask about the various aspects of "elder law" and the types of services that are involved. 

Generally speaking, elder law involves helping individuals and families deal with a wide variety of issues including:

• long term care
• medical directives
• incompetency
• guardianship
• disabilities
• asset protection
• Medicaid 

Care Planning Resources

Here are some websites that may help you get the conversation about advance care planning going:

• The Conversation Starter Kit (www.theconversationproject.org)
• Consumer Toolkit for Health Care Advance Planning (www.ambar.org/healthdecisions) This website helps individuals discover what is truly important to them in the face of a serious illness. It even has a smartphone app you can download.
  
• PREPARE web site (www.prepareforyourcare.org)

Guardianships & Stress

Clients with updated powers of attorney always makes us cheer because having these documents when someone has a stroke or gets in a car accident avoids the unnecessary stress of a guardianship proceeding.

Why are guardianships stressful?

Guardianships involve the court and can be costly and burdensome to family and friends who are already experiencing a stressful situation.

Also, with any nursing home issues, having the correct gifting provisions in your financial power of attorney can be essential to long term care planning and to the protection of the healthy spouse.

Please note that if your documents haven’t been updated in the last 5 years, they should be reviewed by your estate planning attorney to determine whether updating them is necessary. It should also be noted that some financial institutions are not accepting old documents.