To answer that question, you have to know what a Responsible Party is. Generally speaking, there are a number of documents in which someone will sign as a Responsible Party, but a lot of the time, who the Responsible Party is or how Responsible Party is defined can be blurred. There is a tremendous amount of case law on that, but basically, at the end of the day, whether Conservator or Power of Attorney, if you are signing as Responsible Party and Responsible Party is defined in the agreement to mean that you, as an individual, be responsible for all payments should your loved one be unable to pay, then you're going to be liable. The reverse of that occurs when you sign something as a Conservator and you have probate court approval and you're not designating yourself as a Responsible Party, but rather as a Conservator of the individual with explicit probate court approval. The liability in that respect is diminished if not eliminated entirely depending upon the other set of circumstances or facts. Typically, there's a guarantor agreement and most people do not sign that. 

This scenario arises most in the cases where a loved one has to be placed in 24-hour nursing care. At some point it is more likely than not that the family and facility will be relying on Title 19 benefits for their cost of care for a particular individual. Those documents can be very confusing. And because people are typically overwhelmed and emotional when making that transition, sometimes on an emergency basis or otherwise, you must be very careful. I have been doing this for almost 19 years. The amount of people that have come to me with an admissions agreement from a 24-hour nursing care facility in my 19-year career before signing it has been probably less than 1% but the exposure to liability depending on how the agreement is written is extreme.

There are ways to avoid or minimize liability if you approach the admission of a loved one into a 24-hour nursing care facility the right way. If you designate your best friend Pam or your son Joey or whoever that is, 99.9% of the time the court is going to honor your wishes and appoint that individual, keep it all in the family. If there is not a designation, you then run into a situation where the court is going to appoint what we call a professional Conservator, which is someone like me. 

I receive appointments frequently and at that point my sole purpose is to do what is in the best interest of the conserved person. But what keeps me up at night is that I do not know them very well. I do not know what they want or what they do not want. Did they ever contemplate the living will, do they want one? Because usually when I get involved, that is an instance in which that individual has a complete lack of capacity. They cannot tell me what their wishes are. This happens a lot of the times in Alzheimer's patients, dementia patients. There is no one who can express their wishes. That is why the appointment of a Conservator is important as part of your planning, even with the potential liability as a responsible party. If handled correctly, you can limit liability and have an individual who knows you act as your Conservator to be sure a stranger is not making very personal decisions for you when you cannot make those decisions on your own. So these are the things, again for you to evaluate during your lifetime to make sure that you're taken care of and make sure that your loved ones are taken care of and make sure everyone's on the same page. The bottom line is that we want to make sure everybody is on the same page with some very serious decisions, right?