Boomer or Bust: Your Financial Guide to Retirement, Health Care, Medicare, and Long-Term Care

Chapter 14. Advance-Care Health Directives

	“Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.”
	--W. Somerset Maugham

Good advice, but hard to follow. Still, it might explain the reluctance of many people to have an advance-care health directive. This important document does not have a snappy name like a living will, but it is perhaps the best way to deal with planning for a serious illness.

Following the long, lingering death of Terri Schiavo and the media circus that surrounded the tragedy that became her final years, many people resolved to look into what they needed to do to avoid her fate. But time has a way of dulling our sense of immediacy when dealing with difficult and complex issues. ...