My fil has been living with us for 6 mo. after not having the money to stay in a long term care facility. He has end stage renal disease, heart disease and in operable bladder cancer. He has been refered to Hospice but refuses due to not being able to continue his dialysis on Hospice. We have palitive care coming in. They have brought up this need to have a will in place and want to refer him to an attorney. I can not see him paying for an attorney.
He does not respond when I have talked to him about putting his wishes in writing. He will say "yah, I need to do that" but doesn't. He is still married and has no contact with his wife. Everything will defer to her if he dosen't at lease put it in writing.
Has anyone else had issues with this? We have our hands tied, with him saying one thing and not acting on it. From that I gather he wants her to control his estate. But why would he make the effort to have the conversation with us?
I think he might be afraid of letting go of more than he already has due to his illness.
I have talked to him on a couple of occations. Once asking his to due us a favor and write down what he wants done with his thing, "let us know if you want something to go to this one or that person" another time I asked if he would like to fill out paperwork at the bank to turn his bank account over when he dies (pay upon death benefit). His response is agreeable but he doesn't take any action on it.
It puts us in a akward position. And being referred to Hospice tells us he doesn't have a lot of time.
You'd meet with them in advance & take all of dad's info so that a draft can be done. You can with your phone do an interview with dad in which he tells you what he wants and you download this for the atty to base the draft on. Then atty comes to meet with dad 1-on-1 to validate & tweak if need be. If all looks good, I'd bet the atty calls his office for a couple of paralegals to come over to witness. All done! The will must be done however your state requires for spouses… like he may have to mention her in his will. If need be, you all just pay for the atty.
Having a estranged but legal wife somewhere out there and not dealing with her is setting the stage for a lot of issues. Your gonna be some kinda upset if she waltzes in, has his bank account frozen and eventually ends up with all funds and you are left with dealing with his funeral, burial and bills.
She could get all including the final SS burial payment that is only paid to spouses.
About no dialysis on hospice, if this is coming from dad, you might want to call hospice provider to see what they say regarding dialysis. I think whatever is indicated as his primary diagnosis is what hospice rules apply to. So say if his cancer is viewed as the terminal disease (that is getting him eligible for hospice) then nothing can be done that could "cure" his cancer but if he got pneumonia then it could be treated as it's separate and not related to the cancer so can be done. So if dad's primary diagnosis is heart disease, then hospice can do diayslis as long as it is not related to the admitting diagnosis. Comprende? I'd bet that some hospice groups do not have a dialysis unit or existing affiliation with a mobile dialysis provider, so they don't want to deal with it. I'd suggest you contact one of the bigger hospice groups like VITAS or Compassus or Southern to see what they say.
Medicaid deals with married couples all the time. That wife would be considered the "community spouse" and her income does not count towards his eligibility. Now their assets do, although the CS can have funds in savings (usually 119K) plus their home and a car. Now getting her to deal with the application and work to get him Medicaid eligible may be a non-starter. But couples where 1 stays in the community & the other goes into a NH facility paid for by Medicaid is done routinely.