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    April 17, 2013

    PINNACLE Updates Advising Older Clients and Their Families, An Important Resource for Elder Law Practitioners

    Help elderly clients with crucial late-life financial, health-care, and long-term care decisions with assistance from State Bar of Wisconsin PINNACLE.

    April 17, 2013 – In March 2013, State Bar of Wisconsin PINNACLE® released the latest supplement to Advising Older Clients and Their Families Vol. 2 – available both in print and via Books UnBound®, PINNACLE’s subscription-based online library – updated by some of Wisconsin’s most experienced elder law attorneys.

    Help Clients with Some of Late Life’s most Daunting Decisions

    Advising Older Clients and Their Families Vol. 2 focuses on issues that are impossible to avoid and have become more challenging to resolve as the interrelated trends of lengthening life expectancies and increasing health-care costs show few signs of abating. The volume begins with discussions of sources of payment for medical and long-term care expenses: Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, and private insurance policies. The chapter on estate planning provides a compact introduction to disposition of property after death, with a focus on helping clients maintain appropriate eligibility for governmental benefits while making lifetime transfers. Substitute decision-making documents and procedures – powers of attorney for finances and health care, guardianships, and protective placements and services – are discussed. The final chapters describe long-term care resources, both home-based and institutional, and alert attorneys to the complicated and nearly ever-changing state and federal laws and regulations involved.

    Learn About Significant Recent Developments

    The 2013 supplement to Advising Older Clients contains case law, statutory, and regulatory updates, including discussion of the Medicare “improvement standard” litigation settlement, federal and state cases dealing with trusts, federal legislation affecting the estate and gift taxes, and developments concerning Wisconsin’s SeniorCare and Family Care programs. Many examples of computations concerning federal and state assistance programs were updated to reflect revised eligibility levels and benefit amounts, such as the January 2013 changes to the federal poverty guidelines.

    Authors of this 2013 update are Maren Beermann, Margaret DeWind, Mitchell Hagopian, Megann Senfleben Hendrix, Margaret Wrenn Hickey, Mary Hogue, Robert Lightfoot Jr., Heather Poster, and Carol Wessels.

    Get the Newly Revised Chapter on Guardianships and Protective Placements

    Chapter 16 has been revised for the first time since passage of the guardianship and protective placement reform and recodification legislation in 2006. Among the significant topics discussed are statutory changes concerning the determination of incompetency; the revised statutes’ new emphasis on limiting a guardian’s powers to only those essential for the protection of the ward; the effect of a potential ward’s health-care and financial powers of attorney on choice of a guardian; and the clarified procedure for obtaining a temporary guardianship. A particularly noteworthy topic is the 2012 decision in Fond du Lac County v. Helen E.F., concerning the procedures for institutional care of persons with Alzheimer’s disease.

    Order Your Copies Today

    The print version of Advising Older Clients and Their Families Vol. 2 is available to State Bar members for $219, plus tax and shipping. Subscribers to the Bar’s automatic supplementation service receive updates at a discount off the regular price. Annual subscriptions to Books UnBound start at $149 per title and $649 for the full library (single-user prices; call for law-firm pricing). To order these titles, or for more information, visit WisBar’s Marketplace or contact the State Bar at (800) 728-7788 or (608) 257-3838.



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