2016 Articles

Health Care Proxies - Ten Difficult Issues

Swidler, Robert N.

Health care proxies have proven valuable and popular, difficult issues can still arise in their use. This article examines ten such issues, including: can a person who lacks health care decision making capacity still create a health care proxy?; where there is both a guardian and a health care agent, who makes health care decisions?; can a person appoint co-agents and provide for decisions by agreement or by majority vote of co-agents; does a health care agent have any authority while the patient still has capacity?; can the agent override a decision previously expressed by the patient; can a health care agent remove a patient from a hospital against medical advice (AMA)?