Health Care Planning

What Is Health Care Planning?

Health care planning ensures your medical wishes are known and legally enforceable, even if you're ever unable to speak for yourself. It centers on two distinct but complementary documents: a Designation of Health Care Surrogate and a Florida Living Will, which together form the foundation of any comprehensive advance care plan.

Designation of Health Care Surrogate

A Health Care Surrogate designation (sometimes called a Health Care Proxy) is a legal document in which you appoint a trusted person, your surrogate, to make medical decisions on your behalf if you become incapacitated. Your surrogate steps into your shoes and communicates with your doctors, evaluates treatment options, and makes decisions consistent with your values and wishes.

Florida Living Will

A Living Will is a written statement of your own wishes regarding end-of-life medical care. It tells your doctors, your surrogate, and your family what kinds of life-prolonging measures you do or do not want if you are in a terminal condition, a persistent vegetative state, or an end-stage condition with no reasonable expectation of recovery.

What a Health Care Planning Can Do

  • Authorize a trusted person to make health care decisions on your behalf if you are incapacitated.

  • Direct your medical team on your wishes regarding the use, or withdrawal, of life-prolonging procedures.

  • Specify your preferences regarding artificial nutrition and hydration.

  • Grant your surrogate access to your medical records and the ability to consult with your physicians (HIPAA authorization).

  • Relieve your family members of the painful burden of making difficult medical decisions without guidance.

What a Health Care Planning Cannot Do

  • Grant your surrogate the authority to make financial or legal decisions on your behalf; that requires a separate Durable Power of Attorney.

  • Take effect while you still have the capacity to make your own medical decisions; your surrogate's authority only activates upon a physician's determination of incapacity.

  • Override your own wishes if you regain capacity.

  • Obligate a physician to provide treatment they consider medically futile or ethically inappropriate, though they may be required to transfer your care.

  • Function as a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order; a DNR is a separate physician's order through a separate process.

This is right for you if:

  • You want a say in who makes medical decisions for you, rather than leaving that question to family members who may disagree with each other in a crisis

  • You have specific wishes about life-prolonging treatment that you want honored, not guessed at

  • You want to spare the people you love from having to make agonizing decisions without any guidance from you

  • You haven't reviewed these documents in years, or have never had them at all

Few documents carry as much weight in a moment of crisis as these two. They don't just protect you; they protect the people who would otherwise be left guessing.

Is Health Care Planning Right For You?

How Ace Legacy Law, PLLC Can Help

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