estate planning – Law and Legal Research

How Safe is Your Insurance Policy?

How often do you track your stock portfolio? Daily? Monthly? Or, have you stopped looking altogether? Now, how often do you track your insurance portfolio? If you have purchased life insurance in the past, you may have checked the ratings for your insurer at the time of purchase. However, ratings change and if you do not monitor the health of your insurer, you may end up disappointed should your insurer collapse.

The Florida Insurance Law Blog highlighted this issue recently when one of their attorneys learned that the Virginia Department of Insurance had placed Shenandoah Life, the insurance company from which he had purchased a Universal Life insurance policy, under receivership.

A.M. Best rates the credit of insurance companies. You can review their ratings of insurance companies with a free registration. For the insurer in question, A.M. Best had downgraded their financial strength rating from A- (Excellent) to B++ (Good) on September 26, 2008. Two months later, A.M. Best placed their rating under review pending a proposed merger between OneAmerica and Shenandoah Life. The day after OneAmerica terminated its letter of intent concerning the proposed merger, the State Corporation Commission of Virginia was appointed as a receiver for Shenandoah Life.

To avoid getting surprised, visit the Best’s Ratings & Analysis Center to see the state of your insurer.

Rethinking Advance Health Care Directives

Yahoo!/AP: Man Declared Dead Feels “Pretty Good”. Four months after he was declared brain dead and doctors were about to remove his organs for transplant, Zach Dunlap says he feels “pretty good.”

As part of the estate planning process, you may have drafted a living will and a power of attorney for health care to set forth the accepted course of treatment should you become incapacitated and to appoint a person to act on your behalf with regards to medical decisions. You may have directed that medical procedures that will only extend the dying process be withheld should your physician determine that you have an incurable or irreversible terminal injury and that your death is imminent except for death delaying procedures.

Now, the Mayo Clinic describes various states of consciousness ranging from stupor to brain death. It states that “[w]hen brain death occurs, there is no sign of any brain functioning. This condition is not reversible.“

However, in the Yahoo!/AP article, the “brain dead” man is alive and talking about it. So, either he wasn’t “brain dead” or brain death is reversible. Knowing this, do you want your doctors to withhold medical care if you were declared brain dead? Also, if you are acting as a loved one’s power of attorney, will you be able to carry out their wishes and withhold medical care should he or she be declared brain dead? Withholding medical care is never an easy decision to make and knowing that someone recovered after being declared brain dead just made it even harder.