Coronavirus and Estate Planning 101: The Need for a Health Care Proxy

When you understand that the end is inevitable, you have to take necessary steps to safeguard your future and that of your family. And with many fatal cases due to coronavirus, be ready for anything.

Making a decision on an impending incapacity, deterioration, or chronic illness can be emotional and difficult for many folks. The capability to select somebody to handle all your medical-related decisions when you aren’t in a position to make them has become a vital cog in estate planning.

Without having a document that legally assigns someone to perform this task as needed, your wishes might be null and void. Proper preparation allows your loved ones to make the right choices about your health care. There is little solace to be found in knowing that you wanted a certain form of care while in isolation only for it not to happen because you didn’t prepare beforehand.

With the need to keep such information private, your family might not know your wishes in advance. Many people shield their relatives from the challenging conversation of discussing terminal illnesses and death – two of the taboo topics in the world.

However, if you don’t deliver this info to your nearest and dearest, you end up making them run wild guesses regarding fulfillment of your treatment wishes.
It is therefore imperative to come up with guidelines about your desires in terms of critical care especially when in isolation. The proxy needs to possess the legal capacity to serve; otherwise it will be disregarded by the attending physician.

Failure to have a legally-binding document giving your proxy the authority to act will compromise your healthcare goals and leave your final moments spent in agony knowing you are going through medical practices that you never wanted.

If you don’t assign a proxy right now, you might find yourself in isolation surrounded by medical personnel calling the shots, often ending in results that you didn’t want at all.

Waking up one day and coming up with a simple document might be feasible especially when in quarantine. This is why you need to avoid the generic forms that are provided to make things easy for you. Instead, sit down with an estate planning lawyer and come up with the right document for your needs.

Picking a proxy might not be as easy as it seems. You might have a family member in mind, but this might not be a good decision because they cannot take into control their feelings when they see you suffering.

Sadly, many people opt for their family members, only to find out later that they head for the hills when faced with the idea of making a crucial decision.
This limits your selections considerably. The best way is to select a proxy that isn’t a part of your family to handle the task.

It would be wrong to assign multiple persons to act as proxies when you are debilitated. The main reason is that the two might end up arguing when the time comes for a critical decision to be made.