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Living Will Lawyer in Central Pennsylvania
Jameson Stone Law prepares living wills and healthcare directives across Central Pennsylvania, and Daniel Jameson leads the estate work. Most people asking for a living will actually need two documents rather than one, and the second is the one that gets used far more often. Which is worth understanding before either is signed.
Two Documents
A Living Will Only Covers the Narrowest Situation
A living will is a written statement of your own treatment wishes. Under Pennsylvania’s Advance Directive for Health Care Act it applies only where you have an end-stage medical condition or are permanently unconscious. Those terms are defined narrowly. An end-stage condition is one that will result in death despite continued treatment. Permanent unconsciousness means an irreversible loss of consciousness.
Which leaves out the situation that arises most. Somebody comes out of surgery badly and cannot make decisions for a fortnight. Somebody has a stroke and is expected to recover some function. Neither of those is end-stage or permanent, so a living will does nothing at all. What covers them is a healthcare power of attorney, which names a person to decide for you whenever you cannot decide for yourself, without any of those conditions attached. In practice it is the document families rely on.
When It Applies
Three Things Have to Be True Before It Does Anything
The statute sets out exactly when a living will becomes operative, and it takes all three together. The attending physician has to have received a copy. The physician has to have determined that you are incompetent. And the physician has to have determined that you have an end-stage condition or are permanently unconscious. Until every one of those is satisfied, the document has no force, and while you can still communicate your own decisions govern regardless of what it says.
The first condition is where plans quietly fail. A living will sitting in a safe deposit box, or in a lawyer’s file, or in a drawer at home is not in the hospital record and cannot be followed. Executing it properly needs your signature and two adult witnesses. Notarization is not required in Pennsylvania, though it is often added so the document travels better to other states. Getting copies into the right hands afterward matters as much as the drafting did.
Without One
The Statute Picks Someone, and It May Not Be Who You Would
Pennsylvania does not leave the decision to whoever happens to be in the corridor. Where somebody becomes incompetent with no living will and no healthcare agent, the law appoints a health care representative in a set order of priority, starting with the spouse together with any adult children who are not children of that spouse, then adult children, then parents, then siblings, then adult grandchildren, and then a close friend.
Two problems follow from that. The person the statute selects may not be the person you would have chosen, and nobody gets a say in it after the fact. And where several people share the same rank and disagree with each other, decisions can stall, occasionally ending up in guardianship proceedings before the Orphans’ Court while treatment waits. For a blended family in particular, that first category is worth reading twice.
What We Handle
Advance Directives We Prepare
Living Wills
Your own treatment instructions, drafted to be specific enough to actually guide a decision.
Healthcare Powers of Attorney
Naming the person who decides for you, covering situations a living will never reaches.
Combined Directives
A single document doing both jobs, which is how most of these are sensibly prepared.
Reviews and Updates
Revisiting an old directive after a diagnosis, a divorce, or the death of a named agent.
Our Process
How We Put These in Place
01
Work Out Who Decides
Who you want speaking for you, who the alternate is, and whether either of them would actually be reachable.
Draft Both Documents
The instructions and the appointment together, since one without the other leaves a gap that gets found later.
Get Copies Where They Belong
Your physician, your agent, and your family, because a directive nobody holds cannot be followed by anyone.
Frequently Asked Questions
These documents are cheap, quick, and among the most useful things in an estate plan, and they are the ones most often skipped because they are uncomfortable to think about. The conversation takes about twenty minutes and it spares your family from having to guess during the worst week of their lives.
Do I need a living will if I already have a power of attorney?
Probably, but check which kind you have. A financial power of attorney covers banking, property and taxes and does nothing for medical decisions. A healthcare power of attorney does cover medical decisions, and it works in far more situations than a living will does, so if you only have one document that is the better one to have. What a living will adds is your own voice on the specific question of life-sustaining treatment, which spares your agent from having to make that particular decision without knowing what you would have wanted. Most people are best served by both, and in Pennsylvania they can be combined into a single document.
Does it need to be notarized?
No. Pennsylvania requires your signature and two witnesses who are at least eighteen, and notarization is not a legal requirement. Many attorneys add a notary acknowledgment anyway, because hospitals in other states sometimes expect one and it makes the document more portable if you are travelling or spend part of the year elsewhere. What matters far more than the notary is that the witnesses were present properly and that copies reach the people who will need them.
What if my family disagrees with what it says?
A properly executed living will directs the attending physician, and providers are required either to follow it or to arrange a transfer to someone who will. That is precisely its value. Families disagree constantly in these situations, usually out of love rather than anything else, and a document removes the argument by taking the decision out of their hands. Where there is no document, the disagreement is the process, and it is the reason some of these cases end up before a judge.
A Document Nobody Has Is a Document Nobody Follows
A living will only becomes operative once your physician holds a copy of it. Preparing one is straightforward, and making sure it is somewhere useful afterward is the part that gets forgotten. Daniel Jameson leads the firm’s estate work, and the first conversation costs nothing.