Then plan carefully
This horror story from Florida (where else?) should give anyone pause who lives alone away from relations “as 3 out of 5 Americans in their 80s do.” Or if you have a family member who does (Washington Post):
When Douglas Hulse pulled his Ford Mustang convertible into a Florida gas station three years ago, he looked so distressed that someone called 911.
An ambulance rushed him to Orlando Health South Seminole Hospital, where doctors said he had a stroke. At 80, the retired pilot who had flown famous passengers around the country could no longer care for himself.
[…]
A hospital can be liable if a patient is discharged into an unsafe environment. Because Hulse lived alone and the hospital officials saw no sign that he had family, that put them in a bind when his health didn’t improve. So they argued in court that he was no longer capable of making his own decisions and needed a guardian — a caretaker with enormous legal power.
Medicare “pays the hospital by diagnosis, not length of stay,” so when Hulse started costing the hospital money, they quickly washed their hands of him. The court assigned as Hulse’s guardian Dina Carlson, a 51-year-old former real estate agent, the Post reports.
The guardian a year later sold his home in an unadvertised sale to realtors in her neighborhood for $215,000. “A company called Harding Street Homes bought Hulse’s home and resold it a few months later for $347,000 — $132,000 more than Hulse got for it.”
“It’s unclear what efforts the hospital made to track down any relatives,” the Post reports. The guardian initially made none. Hulce’s niece in Pennsylvania had not heard from him in a while and could neither reach him nor find out where he’d gone. Only when she typed his name into Westlaw did she spot Hulce’s name in a guardianship case.
“If they just called me none of this would have happened,” she told the Post.
There’s much, much more, including a state and Washington Post investigation:
The inspector general’s office, lacking the investigative power of law enforcement, including the ability to subpoena bank records, pushed for a criminal investigation. It urged law enforcement to look into the handling of Hulse home and two others Carlson sold with the same real estate agents, stressing it had found “probable cause” that Carlson and the real estate agents “engaged in a scheme to defraud.”
[…]
On March 16, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said its preliminary inquiry found “no evidence” to warrant a criminal investigation “at this time,” according to an email received in the FOIA request.
Advocates for the elderly say police and prosecutors often do not treat financial exploitation of elderly people seriously enough and are reluctant to sink time into cases where the only witness has dementia, if still alive.
Two days after the state declined to pursue a criminal investigation, Hulse died.
A spokesman for Orlando Health South Seminole Hospital “urged people to draw up a will or designate someone to make their health decisions and to note this in their medical file.”
Too little, too late for Hulse and his family.
The Florida Department of Elder Affairs, after being contacted by The Post, reprimanded Carlson for her failure to file timely reports. Her penalty: She must take eight more hours of classroom training.
I’m horrified. And on notice. Now you are.