Maine Center for Elder Law Blog

Maine Center for Elder Law attorney Barbara S. Schlichtman was recently interviewed by local station WMTW's Tyler Cadorette regarding an Improvident Transfer case in Maine.

Maine’s Improvident Transfer of Title Act, M.
Read more . . .

Maine Center for Elder Law attorney Barbara Schlichtman says "if you are over 18 and you have a checking account or a bike, you have assets and that means you have an estate." We don't often think of young adults as needing "estate" planning, but there are basic legal documents they (and everyone) should have: an Advance Health Care Directive, HIPAA authorization, and Durable Power of Attorney.

ATTENTION PARENTS! Did you know once your child turns 18, you no longer have automatic access to:

• your child's health records;
• your child's medical condition; and
• your child's education records (without a Read more . . .
  
  

We think it's great that there is so much information out there on the importance of talking with your family about your wishes. Sure, it's daunting to find time to sifting through all the website, blogs, articles, posts and tweets; but the result of all the communication is that we really are increasingly aware of what's important as we age. And awareness is a great step toward dong something about it. So are websites like the conversation project (see our blog post on "the conversation"

... and on that farm he had some veggies!

Maine Senior FarmShare Program
 
The Maine Senior FarmShare Program entitles eligible seniors to receive a FarmShare, $50 worth, of first-quality, fresh local produce from a Maine farm for a core eight-week period during the growing season.  Seniors sign up directly with a participating farmer each year in April.

Ellen Goodman, Co-Founder and Director of The Conversation Project, says the primary reason people gave for not talking to their loved ones was "It’s too soon." But it’s always too soon … until it’s too late.

"In some recess of my mind, I still assumed that death came in the way we used to think of as 'natural.' I thought that doctors were the ones who would tell us what needed to be done. I was strangely unprepared, blindsided by the cascading number of decisions that fell to me in her last years. I had to say no to one procedure and yes to another, no to the bone marrow test, yes and yes again to antibiotics. How often I wished I could hear her voice in my ear telling me what she wanted. And what she didn’t want."

Read her New York Times blog post here... maybe it will help start your own conversation.

It used to be that reverse mortgages were considered the last resort for elderly retirees needing an income stream. Seems things may be changing. One of our local professionals, Sharron Eastman, President of Big Horizon Mortgage Corp., recently shared this Wall Street Journal article written by Wade Pfau.

"Reverse mortgages provide the ability to borrow a portion of your home equity without being required to repay the loan until the owner has permanently left it. The idea for reverse mortgages is that the value of your home is eventually used to repay your loan balance.

To the extent that there ever was much of a conversation about reverse mortgages as a retirement income tool, that conversation typically focused on either real or perceived negatives related to the traditionally high costs and potentially inappropriate uses for these funds. The assumption in financial and retirement planning was that reverse mortgages should only be considered as a last resort, once all other resources and possibilities had failed.

Well, a lot has changed in the past several years, and the result is that reverse mortgages have an undeserved bad reputation."

Read the full article here.

An Annals of Internal Medicine paper reports that the money needed to treat dementia in a patient’s final five years is greater than for heart disease and cancer. Take a look at this New York Times article by Gina Kolata.
 
Three diseases, leading killers of Americans, often involve long periods of decline before death. Two of them — heart disease and cancer — usually require expensive drugs, surgeries and hospitalizations. The third, dementia, has no effective treatments to slow its course.

So when a group of researchers asked which of these diseases involved the greatest health care costs in the last five years of life, the answer they found might seem surprising. The most expensive, by far, was dementia.

The study looked at patients on Medicare. The average total cost of care for a person with dementia over those five years was $287,038. For a patient who died of heart disease it was $175,136. For a cancer patient it was $173,383. Medicare paid almost the same amount for patients with each of those diseases — close to $100,000 — but dementia patients had many more expenses that were not covered.

On average, the out-of-pocket cost for a patient with dementia was $61,522 — more than 80 percent higher than the cost for someone with heart disease or cancer. The reason is that dementia patients need caregivers to watch them, help with basic activities like eating, dressing and bathing, and provide constant supervision to make sure they do not wander off or harm themselves. None of those costs were covered by Medicare.

"Everything gets complicated when a person has dementia," noted Dr. Christine K. Cassel, a geriatrician and chief executive of the National Quality Forum.

Maine Center for Elder Law attorneys have helped many seniors and their families with estate planning designed to fit each unique situation. We never know what life will bring our way, but we do know we can plan in advance--for everyone's sake.

Read more of the NYT article here.

The New York Times has been running an excellent series by columnist Paula Span called "The New Old Age." In a recent piece, Paula wrote about the "unbefriended" (and the term doesn't have anything to do with Facebook). We thought this was an informative article to share on the importance of Advance Health Care Directives. Read on!

Near the End, It's Best to Be 'Friended'

The unconscious man in his 90s was brought to an emergency room where Dr. Douglas White was a critical care physician. The staff couldn’t find any relatives to make medical decisions on his behalf.

“He had outlived all his family,” recalled Dr. White, who now directs an ethics program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “We were unable to locate any friends. We even sent the police to knock on his neighbors’ doors.”

Nobody could find an advance directive, either. In the end, the hospital’s ethics committee had to help guide the medical team to decisions about continuing life support.

Experts describe patients like this one as “unbefriended.” But you can also be unbefriended, even if you do have friends and family, if you are incapacitated and haven’t appointed someone you trust as a health care proxy.

Read the full article here.