Why Should You Designate a Healthcare Power of Attorney as Part of Your Long-Term Care Planning?

Why Should You Designate a Healthcare Power of Attorney as Part of Your Long-Term Care Planning? Dive into the critical importance of designating a Healthcare Power of Attorney (HPOA) as part of your Long-Term Care Planning with Hooper Law Office Attorney Justin Randall on this Local Five Live appearance. Program hosts Lisa Malak and Millaine Wells discuss the importance of understanding your healthcare decisions and how an HPOA is essential for ensuring that your wishes are respected when you may no longer be able to advocate for yourself.

Lisa Malak
Welcome back to Local Five Live. It's one of the most important things you can do for your family when it comes to Long-Term Planning.

Millaine Wells
Today with Hooper Law Office and Attorney Justin Randall, we're talking all about your healthcare documents. Good morning, Justin. Nice to see you.

Justin Randall
Nice to see you guys, too.

Millaine Wells
So what healthcare documents would you consider an important part of an Estate plan?

Justin Randall
So there's really three healthcare documents that you should always have in place. There's a Healthcare Power of Attorney. There's a HIPAA authorization and a living will.

Lisa Malak
To explain the differences between those three to us, if you would.

Justin Randall
Yeah. So a Healthcare Power of Attorney is not unlike a financial Power of Attorney, and that it allows people to make decisions on your behalf. But in this case, it's making healthcare decisions. And those healthcare decisions range from just, you know, your day-to-day healthcare decisions. And it can also go as far as making end-of-life decisions for a loved one as well. So this is a really, really important document because if you don't have this in place and you are unable to sign one when the time comes for your family to have this authority, then you have to go through a process called guardianship for them to get that authority. And that can just be added. Stress on the family Added costs to the family. A HIPAA authorization. I'm sure this is a document that pretty much everybody has signed at this point. I would be pretty surprised if we haven't all signed to have authorization throughout our lives. But HIPAA is the law that says doctors, healthcare professionals can't talk to third parties without your prior authorization. So this is essentially a list of people that you provide to the doctor saying, here's who I want you to be able to talk to.

Justin Randall
If they reach out on my behalf. So it's not decision-making. It's just information, access, and then a living will, which is also sometimes called a declaration to healthcare professionals. This is really your end-of-life wishes that you are codifying or putting into a document. So whether you want to be on life support, whether you would want to be removed from life support if you can't recover and what you want that to look like when the time comes. It's also a document where people will sometimes put in certain religious requirements, but they have it at the end of life as well. But this is really what makes it, you know, make your wishes known. When we're talking about end-of-life wishes.

Millaine Wells
Justin, who makes a good agent under a Healthcare Power of Attorney.

Justin Randall
The best Healthcare Power of Attorney that you can have is somebody who is trustworthy, somebody who is responsible and is able to, you know, act quickly when you need them to Somebody who is there, when you need them to be there. So you don't need them to have the background knowledge necessarily or be a healthcare professional themselves, that's not a necessity.

Justin Randall
And acting in this role and can certainly help. But having somebody that you trust to follow your wishes, that you think after having conversations about end-of-life wishes that they are comfortable or as comfortable as they can be, and acting those wishes on location can also be a pretty big factor with Healthcare Powers of Attorney, because a lot of times this is the person that you'd probably want available to go to doctor's appointments or come to the hospital if you need them to.

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