LTC Bullet:

Tuesday March 16, 1999

Seattle--

David Rosenfeld, Vice President and Chief Counsel of the Center for Long-Term Care Financing, has authored a provocative essay on protecting seniors from abusive Medicaid planning. His essay, entitled "Whose Decision Is It Anyway?: Identifying the Medicaid Planning Client," appears in the current volume of the University of Illinois Elder Law Journal (Vol. 6, No. 2, 1999), the preeminent academic journal devoted to elder law issues.

The Center for Long-Term Care Financing opposes Medicaid planning as dangerous to seniors and counterproductive to genuine long-term care reform. Mr. Rosenfeld's essay explores the added risk to seniors when attorneys fail to protect them in the Medicaid planning setting.

*Who is the client when an adult child contacts an attorney?

*Who is the client when an entire family arrives for the initial consultation?

*Who is the client when a senior insists on family approval of financial decisions?

The answer to all of these questions is the same: the senior. Yet too many Medicaid planners try to represent persons in addition to, or even instead of, the senior--ignoring the paramount interests of the senior and the inherent conflict of interest with overzealous relatives and heirs. The essay concludes that individual representation is the only model which allows for identifying and protecting a senior's best interests in this last and most vulnerable stage of life.

Bound copies of the essay are available form the Center while supplies last ($5.00; free to media). Purchase a copy by contacting Nadia Morgen at 206-447-1340 or by clicking here to email your order.
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