ElderLaw Answers Blog

Clearly, with the government potentially spending a trillion dollars to shore up the US financial system, there’s going to be less money to go around for other purposes, whether that’s our roads and railroads or our health and long-term care systems.  As with the Iraq war, there’s little talk about how we’re going to pay for this bail out.  Raising taxes is anathema to most Americans, especially those running for office and looking for votes, so it looks like this means even more borrowing — simply pushing payment for our current spending binge onto our children and grandchildren.

And it looks like more budget cutting.  In recent years, efforts to restrain government spending have included the draconian Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which has made it much more difficult for the middle class to pass on any of their hard-earned savings to their children.  The belt-tightening that is likely to result from this current wave of spending will undoubtedly mean even more stringent restrictions on long-term care planning.

This writer would propose instead a balanced approach to long-term care planning, permitting some transfers and some sharing of long-term care costs.  Those who have benefited from government largesse and the US financial system in general could pay a bit more in taxes to cover the difference.  How about Rep. Barney Frank’s proposed surcharge on those earning more than $1 million a year until this debt is paid off?  And let’s keep the estate tax on estates larger than $2 million ($4 million for a couple) to pay for long-term care.  After all, if we can’t afford it now, what are we going to do when the baby boomers start needing care?

Both the issues and the clients faced by trustees of special needs trusts can be significantly different from those faced by trustees of more traditional trusts created for asset management, tax and asset protection purposes.

I am co-trustee of funds derived from a medical malpractice award for a severely handicapped girl with cerebral palsy. She was born in the United States, but her parents come from the Dominican Republic.

A few years ago, the girl’s mother called me and asked whether the trust would pay for medications from Venezuela that had helped another girl with cerebral palsy. I was rather skeptical, but didn’t want simply to say “no.” So, I asked a number of questions about the name of the medication, its derivation, its dosage, and the amount of times the girl would have to take it. The mother said she would try to get answers to my questions.

A few minutes later, the mother called back to apologize for not being entirely straight with me. It turned out that she did not need the money for medicine, but for a voodoo cure. She was convinced that the reason her daughter had been born with her ailment was that while she was pregnant some one had put a curse on her, the mother. The voodoo doctor, for a fee, would remove the curse.

Being trained in a western tradition, I have no knowledge of these affairs. So I agreed to meet the mom halfway, to split the cost of the voodoo treatment. Unfortunately, it didn’t work.

If the voodoo treatment had worked, or if we truly believed that a voodoo curse was the cause of the initial injury, this would raise a serious doubt about the medical malpractice case which was the source of the trust funds. If the cause was voodoo, how can we find the doctor truly at fault?

After caring for her mother during her final years, New York Times reporter Jane Gross wrote an article on her experience and what she would have done differently if she knew then what she knows now.  Her article elicited more than 300 responses on-line and became the first posting in her on-line blog “The New Old Age: Caring and Coping.”

The blog contains both useful information and inspring stories about coping with caregiving.  Take a look at http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/.

One of the reasons our country and many of our citizens are in such an economic mess now has been the extension of too easy credit in the form of credit cards and mortgages.  Many of the lenders never really cared if the money lent was paid back because they were making so much from interest and fees.

While the mortgage market has tightened up — perhaps a bit too much — we’re all still getting unsolicited credit card offers in the mail.  Mostly this is just a bit of a bother, more mail to go through and dump in the recycling bin.  (It also kills trees in terms of wasted paper.  On the other hand, it means more payments to the U.S. Postal Service, which may keep our postage rates a bit lower.)

But these credit card offers are still bad for those people who accept them and bad for the economy.  When having lunch with a client recently, we came up with a way to make this business a bit more expensive for the credit card companies.  Rather than tearing up and discarding the offers, remove the business reply envelope, seal it, and drop it in the mail.  The credit card company will then have to pay twice the postage — 84 cents — for every empty envelope it receives back.

This, we hope, will be a small deterrent to all of the junk mail we receive.  If we all do it and start a movement, it can become a big deterrent and save some of our fellow citizens from getting in over their heads in debt.