Have you experienced a POA draining a clients estate? POA billing is $!,000./month when client is mentally sharp, although on Hospice. Hospice personnel are in daily contact, and providing ongoing services. Client/patient has auto pay for ALL routine monthly bills, and writes personal checks or uses debit card for all other expenditures. How can POA justify such a charge?
It's becoming clear why so many of our elders end up on Medicaid: attorneys are looking like opportunists who use vulnerable elders for their personally-enhanced lifestyle .
Although one need not be an attorney to be a POA, this circumstance had family members (lawyers!!) pushing Granny to have a non-family POA when she had never wanted or needed one before. They threatened her with Guardianship (by themselves) unless she complied. She had been in a condition of over-medication when this legal action was taken. With a lifelong history of adverse reactions to meds, she was temporarily mentally incapacitated. Rescued from the doctor and facility complicit in the over-medication, she recovered - but was now involved in a court-case seekiing total guardianship. She was crushed - and angry!! Granny was 98 - going on 99!!
$70,000. later, she is of course, not like a 29 year old, but very hurt - and agitated - that her hard-earned life savings has been, and is, being eaten up by lawyers and legal gaming. After providing for her own "final expenses", she had designs of donating to a blind foundation (because she has AMD), the Salvation Army, and a scholarship in her deceased son's name. She is now increasingly concerned about covering her own medical/nursing-care/burial expenses (which includes burial 3,000 miles away - in her pre-purchased family plot)?!
It's a double-whammy, being hit financially, and deliberately hurt by family. Now the POA continues to suck her funds away, having been put in place to appease the family lawyers seeking guardianship.
Meanwhile, I am the 24/7 Caregiver. For the past 20 years, even while working, I have been her physical Caregiver (after a serious auto accident) as well as assisting her in a multitude of other ways. I am her only surviving offspring - and NONE of these others who "care" so much have offered a hand - or a dime.
It hurts me - that they would hurt her so. And these are MY children.
Please let us know what happens along the way. I will keep you and your mother in my prayers.