Power of Attorney

What is a Power of Attorney?

According to Wikipedia:

A power of attorney may be special or limited to one specified act or type of act, or it may be general, and whatever it defines as its scope is what a court will enforce as being its scope. (It may also be limited as to time.) Under the common law, a power of attorney becomes ineffective if its grantor dies or becomes "incapacitated," meaning unable to grant such a power, because of physical injury or mental illness, for example, unless the grantor (or principal) specifies that the power of attorney will continue to be effective even if the grantor becomes incapacitated (but any such power ends when the grantor dies). This type of power of attorney is called a durable power of attorney.

You can start to understand why it is that you need to know the meanings of some of these terms, and how they will effect the decisions that you and your family and physician make regarding your health care wishes.

A Living Will sets out the type of care that you would like to have as you approach your end of life, but does not allow another person to make those decisions for you. A Power of Attorney sets the parameters for another person to act in your behalf, but needs to be specific once you become ''incapacitated'' and unable to make decisions for yourself.

So a Durable Power of Attorney is one that specifically would allow your designate to make decisions for you even if you are incapacitated.

According to Wikipedia a Health Care Proxy is a document "that allows you to appoint an agent to make health care decisions in the event that the primary individual is incapable of executing such decisions. Once the document is drafted, the primary individual continues to be allowed to make health care decisions as long as they are still competent to do so... Health care proxies are by no means mandatory, rather they allow the patient's wishes to be followed even when he/she is incapable of communicating them."

Again, I am using Wikipedia as a resource, whether or not you agree with their definitions, only because it gives us the same type of page to look at from definition to definition. I encourage you to click on the related links, or use your own search engine to discover these meanings. Also, I am not an attorney, nor do I pretend to be one. I serve only to open conversation between you and your family as to your wishes.