Help Emergency Responders Care for Elderly and Disabled

An alarming editorial appeared in the Columbus Dispatch recently. Deborah Kendrick in “Emergency responders can worsen plight of disabled victims” recounted a disquieting incident.

Stephen Pyles, 55, is deaf and unable to communicate verbally. After calling 911 because his house was burglarized, the police officer sent to help instead arresting him because he interpreted Stephen’s frantic attempts to give the officer a hand-written note as aggression.

The rough treatment Stephen received from the officer exacerbated Stephen’s neck pain that had just been treated with surgery a few days before. Stephen feels he cannot trust the police to provide help and protection in the event of another emergency. The author also told of how she experienced what she thought was a stroke and while firemen did come and offer a ride to the hospital, they did not offer any sort of immediate medical attention that would have been needed had the author indeed been experiencing a stroke.

These stories raise a clear warning for those who have loved ones with disabilities. Families cannot completely rely on law enforcement and emergency professionals to always understand the unique limitations of people with disabilities and offer the best assistance during crisis.

Family members of people with disabilities need to make plans for emergencies so that their loved ones’ health and safety is protected as much as possible. Some specific ways to prepare for emergencies would be to:

1. Instruct family members with disabilities to contact family members right after emergency professionals,

2. Keeping relevant health records in an easily accessible location and instructing family members to give the materials to emergency professionals, and

3. Enlisting neighbors and nearby friends to offer assistance in emergency situations.

If the family member is not their own guardian, legal documents must be prepared so that non-relative friends who offer assistance will have the legal authority to do so and the family member will not be placed in foster care.

All of this is taken care of in our routing estate planning for Golowin Legal clients. Whether that includes Health Care Powers of Attorney, Living Wills, HIPAA Release forms, all instantly available to family and emergency responders alike, or whether that includes rarely used Do Not Resuscitate documents clearly visible in the home. For children, their Kids Protection Plan serves a similar purpose.

Family members are the most important people in our lives, and the one of the best ways we can show our love for them is by protecting them from potentially traumatic and even life-threatening traumatic events through careful planning.

Non-Profit Leads Push for Tax Credit for Special Needs Families

A Florida non-profit organization has begun a petition drive urging Congress to offer a tax credit to families of children with special needs to assist with the costs of obtaining guardianship.

Prosperity Life Planning, the organization behind the petition, teaches families of children with special needs how to locate resources for their children while preserving access to government benefits. According to a recent article in US News and World Report, the organization decided to pursue the petition because "families often can't afford to set up a guardianship, which involves court expenses and doctors' fees, so they don't do it."

Once a child turns 18, parents’ legal relationship with the child changes because suddenly it is presumed that the child has the ability to make decisions on her own, regardless of her abilities. At this point, one option is to become the child's legal guardian so that the parents can continue to make the important medical and financial decisions on child’s behalf. The proposed tax credit would give families an incentive to pursue guardianship, which many avoid because of the costs.
Prosperity Life Planning is proposing that a tax credit of up to $5,000 would be available to reimburse families for the legal fees they incur in order to obtain guardianship of their child.

The same tax credit could also be used to help families establish a supplemental needs trust for their child with special needs. These trusts are used to preserve assets for a person with special needs in order to supplement any benefits he receives from the government. According to the proposal, the tax credit should be made available to any family member of a child with special needs who pursues guardianship or intends to draft a supplemental needs trust (especially in situations where a child is being raised by family members other than her parents) and would be tracked using the child's Social Security number, so only one tax credit per child could be used.

Prosperity Life Planning points out that the government already provides numerous tax incentives for programs that benefit the public, including tax-deductible retirement accounts and education tax credits. Prosperity Life Planning argues that families of children with special needs face greater challenges than most with minimal government resources to assist them.

To read more about the tax credit proposal, and to download a statement that you can mail to Prosperity Life Planning to show your support for their initiative, go to www.prosperitylifeplanning.org.

Financially Preparing for Special-Needs Kids

Sarah Palin's son Trig helps spark a national conversation

By Kimberly Palmer

Posted September 30, 2008

Sarah Palin's 5-month-old son, Trig, who has Down syndrome, has sparked a national conversation about kids with special needs: the extra care they require, available government benefits and the pros and cons of prenatal testing.

One topic that has gotten less attention is the financial stress that parents often face. Many kids with special needs require financial support throughout their lives, and while government assistance often covers basic medical care, holding assets over $2,000 can make them ineligible. That means advance financial planning, through wills, estate planning, and trusts, can be essential to ensuring kids with special needs have the support they require once they grow up.

"If [parents] fail to deal with these issues now, it will jeopardize their child's quality of life down the road," says Tanya Harvey, an attorney who focuses on special-needs planning in the Washington, D.C., law office of Bryan Cave.

Here are tips from leading experts in the field of financial planning for kids with special needs on how to get started:

1) Establish legal guardianship. After a child reaches the age of 18, he is considered an adult. But some kids may still need a guardian, says Harvey. One of her tests includes asking whether a child would impulsively buy a pretty diamond in a store window. If the child shouldn't be held responsible for such a purchase, then he needs to have a legal guardian, or else the contract would be binding.

Karen Greenberg, director of Prosperity Life Planning, a nonprofit that teaches financial planning to families of children with special needs, along with her husband and associate director, Jaret Vogel, are urging Congress to adopt a special-needs tax credit that would help parents pay for the cost of establishing such a guardianship. Their proposal would provide up to $5,000 in tax credits to offset the cost of legal fees.

Families often can't afford to set up a guardianship, which involves court expenses and doctors' fees, so they don't do it, say Greenberg and Vogel.

2) Describe your child in writing. Greenberg recommends writing down a "minibiography" of children that could be given to any future guardians or caretakers. It should include medical information like allergies but also personal preferences, goals, and details about friends.

3) Protect your child's eligibility for public benefits. Medical care can be so expensive that even relatively wealthy families may need to rely on Medicaid and Social Security income. Because having more than $2,000 in assets threatens that eligibility, "you want to make sure that if your child is going to receive any money, that it's in a special-needs trust so it doesn't disqualify them," says Harvey. A lawyer or financial professional can help establish a special-needs trust, which doesn't count against the $2,000 limit. Money left to the child through a will should be directed into this trust.

Parents often choose to set up a trust that goes into effect when they die, says Harvey, to allow them flexibility to spend that money in different ways in the meantime. But families may be better off setting up the trust immediately if a grandparent wants to leave money to the child, for example.

Greenberg adds that another benefit to establishing a trust is that the money is then considered separate from the parents' assets, which protects it from creditors and divorce settlements.

4) Consider insurance policies. Life insurance that pays out upon the death of the second parent—often called "last to die" policies—can help parents ensure their child has enough money after they both die without straining their budgets too much beforehand.

When Greenberg, who has an autistic son, examined her budget several years ago, she decided to purchase such a policy. It pays out $650,000 on the death of Greenberg or her former husband, whichever comes second, for about $2,000 a year. In addition, for years, she tucked away about $400 a month into a special-needs trust, which now holds around $55,000. That means that if both she and her former husband were to die, their son would have the $650,000 life insurance payout and the $55,000 trust. Together, she calculates, that will generate an income of around $35,000 a year—enough to pay the bulk of his expenses.

5) Avoid common family-related mistakes. "A lot of parents say, 'How about if I give money to a relative?'" says Harvey. But doing so is a mistake, she says, because not only is the relative not legally bound to spend that money on your child but a creditor or divorce settlement could take it.

Greenberg recalls looking into her options for her son in the 1980s, when the common wisdom held that parents should leave money to their other children, who would then be expected to care for their sibling with special needs. But Greenberg doesn't like the idea of burdening siblings, who have often already experienced so much stress.

Family members and friends planning to leave money to a child with special needs should also be encouraged to do so through a special-needs trust instead of leaving money directly to the child, which could interfere with benefits eligibility. Grandparents may even want to have their wills looked over by an attorney to make sure any gifts don't threaten that eligibility.

SOURCE: US News & World Report