Resources for Adult Care-providing Children of Senior
Elder Law encompasses many different fields of law which is important to note because the legal problems that affect the elderly are continuously growing in number. Current laws and regulations are also becoming more complex and therefore more challenging for you the adult child of the senior. Attorneys that specialize in dealing with the elderly must have a broad understanding of the laws that impact a given situation to avoid future problems for the senior and their heirs.
Areas of Elder Law Include:
- Preservation/transfer of assets seeking to avoid spousal impoverishment when a spouse enters a nursing home
- Medicaid
- Medicare claims and appeals
- Social security and disability claims and appeals
- Supplemental and long term health insurance issues.
- Disability planning, including use of durable powers of attorney, living trusts, “living wills,” for financial management and health care decisions, and other means of delegating management and decision-making to another in case of incompetency or incapacity.
- Conservatorships and guardianships
- Estate planning, including planning for the management of one’s estate during life and its disposition on death through the use of trusts, wills and other planning documents
- Probate
- Administration and management of trusts and estates
- Long-term care placements in nursing home and life care communities
- Nursing home issues including questions of patients’ rights and nursing home quality
- Elder abuse and fraud recovery cases
- Housing issues, including discrimination and home equity conversions
- Age discrimination in employment
- Retirement, including public and private retirement benefits, survivor benefits and pension benefits
- Health law
- Mental health law
As with any specialty attorney, most Elder Law attorneys do not specialize in every one of these areas. So when an attorney says he/she practices Elder Law, find out which of these matters he/she handles and has years of expertise doing. Remember to hire the attorney who regularly handles matters in the area of concern in your particular case. He/she should also know enough about the other fields related to your issue to question whether the action being taken might be affected by laws in any of the other areas of law on the list. For example, if you are going to rewrite your estate plan and your spouse is ill, the estate planner needs to know enough about Medi-Cal to know whether it is an issue with regard to your spouse’s inheritance and legal rights after the spouses passing.
Attorneys who are members of NAELA, the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys, are focused on continual education in the many areas that elder law touches; so you should ask your elder law attorney if they are affiliated with NAELA. Attorneys who primarily work with the elderly bring more to their practice than an expertise in the appropriate area of law. They bring a long standing knowledge of senior’s needs and that allows them and their staff to empathize with some of the challenging physical and mental difficulties that often accompany the aging process. Any high quality elder law attorney will understand the afflictions of the aged and can therefore offer advice that can more easily determine the best course of action for the client. They are more aware of real life problems, health and otherwise, that tend to overtake us as we age. Elder law attorneys are also usually tied into a system of social workers, psychologists, caregivers and other elder care professionals who may be of assistance to you. All of these things will hopefully make you more comfortable when dealing with them and ease your way as you try to resolve your legal problem.
