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Do the Shoemaker’s Children Have Shoes? |
By: Lawrence N. Berwitz, Esq. & Maureen Rothschild DiTata, Esq.
Berwitz & DiTata LLP
Garden City, New York |
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A dear client of ours passed away this past weekend. She had no family and her friends were all octogenarians, so my partner had agreed to serve as executor. As I heard her make the necessary arrangements after death - funeral, flowers, notifications, cemetery, the whole nine yards - it dawned on me that, while we routinely recommend to our clients that they plan, to protect assets for their loved ones, for tax benefits or against the risks that they will require long term care, and we advise our clients to make gifts and to create trusts, how many of us follow our own advice?
My guess is that we are so busy solving the problems of our clients that we forget to do our own planning, that we are as convinced of our own immortality as some of our clients and that, when faced with the options we typically provide to clients, we find it just as hard to designate alternate care-givers for our children, appoint decision makers for our personal and financial needs, and even part with control of our assets to benefit heirs. Where are our wills, health care proxies and powers of attorney?
Last year, Governor Pataki's proposed budget included provisions that would have essentially eliminated the benefit of advance Medicaid planning. One of the proposed changes would have commenced the penalty time created by an uncompensated transfer on the date of the application rather than on the first day of the month following the transfer. The fact that this change was not included in the final budget is not an indication that this issue is resolved. In fact, we absolutely anticipate continuing efforts by the government to shift more of the cost of long term care from the government to the individual. Moreover, while we, like our clients, reject the notion that we will ever live in a nursing home, there is little likelihood that Medicaid will ever cover the cost of care in what we, on Long Island, know of as assisted living facilities. That said how many of us have purchased long term care insurance?
Medical science and technology have significantly expanded our life expectancies but can afford no promises regarding the quality of our longer lives. How easy is it to forget that our inability to predict if or when our client's will become ill or incapacitated extends to our prognostications regarding our own health and capacity? We have heard of the shoemaker's shoeless children, the roofer's thatched hut and the running toilets of the plumber. There is no time like the present to put our own houses in order.
Editors Note: The authors are with Berwitz & DiTata LLP, a Garden City based Elder Law firm. This firm concentrates in Estate and Retirement Distribution Planning, Estate Administration and Elder Law.
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