Question
10: Will you put financial limits on your terminal care?
A large part of your life-time medical expenses
will
be paid out in the last year of your life.
Usually
it would be much better for you
to
spend the same amount of money earlier in your life.
Put
your medical-care dollars into the prime of your life
rather
than spending wildly at the end
in
a desperate attempt to extend what is probably a poor quality of life.
At present there are few limits on the cost of terminal care.
Whoever
is paying just continues to pay out
whatever
is needed to cover all possible medical interventions.
The
doctors who are ordering these medical treatments
realize
that the same amount of medical resources
would
have done much more good at an earlier time in your life.
But
perhaps you put off seeking medical attention
until
the problem had become serious (and very expensive to treat).
If you wish to place
financial limits on your terminal care,
this
is the place in your Advance Directive to state your philosophy.
Such
voluntary limits,
coming from individual patients such as yourself,
might
serve as a first approximation of the limits
that
should eventually be imposed even on people
who
do not initially agree to any limits.
If you have private health insurance, you already have a built-in limit,
perhaps
one million dollars for any one illness.
What
will your family do if and when that limit is reached?
Some
families then begin to spend their own assets on medical bills.
When
all the liquid assets are gone,
then
the family is poor enough to qualify for medicaid, which has no limit.
How much do you want your family to pay for your terminal care?
If
you do not want your family impoverished paying for your last year,
then
you should explain in your Advance Directive
that
you want no further care if all the insurance money is gone.
This
choice would preserve the family assets
for
those who will need them after you are dead.
If
you are not sure about what should be done, you can at least suggest
that
the point when the insurance money runs out
might
be a good time for the family to assess what goals
they
are trying to achieve thru medical expenditure.
Your
proxies could ask the doctors what benefits might come
from
spending more money on your medical care.
QUESTION
10:
FINANCIAL
LIMITS
by JAMES
PARK
113
The
selection above is the first page of Question 10 from the book:
Your
Last
Year: Creating Your Own Advance Directive for Medical Care.
If you click
this title, you will see
the complete table of contents.
There is one more page exploring options
for placing financial limits on your
terminal care.
If you
would like to see one person's Answer to this Question,
go to James
Park's Advance Directive for Medical Care.
Scroll down to Answer 10.
Go to
the beginning of this website
James
Leonard Park—Free
Library