Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

While this seems horrible, taking care of those who are in true danger without stripping the rights of the still cognizant is a hard problem. It's very likely for those who need help to deny it or fight it, so in the end, you need to be able to exert that final control, but how do you do verify that the person being protected really needs it?

View on HN

It doesn't seem particularly difficult. A discerning judge, a caring social worker, and an honest doctor with adequate time to consider the issue carefully should have little problem seeing the right course of action.

It only becomes difficult when you also have to fight against the incentives.

When the 'guardian' gets to bill the estate when their doctor friend writes something down, and the judges are listening to the letter of the law as argued by the expert lawyers rather than the flabbergasted victims, then it's a hard problem.

Yeah, there is no way they should be allowed to bill the estate which they themselves are administrating.

In a normal country with a social welfare program, the guardian would have to bill the government — if the government doesn't agree to lay down money to say that this person needs protecting, nobody gets paid.

(In an honest no-government-programs libertarian paradise like the US sometimes pretends to aspire to be, the guardian would have to bill some kind of health insurer that covered this specific care: and again, the insurer would take on the task of scrutinizing the claim.)

It is likely that the person in charge of quality of life and the person in charge of financial decisions should be different people, and somewhat adversarial. Neither should be paid directly out of the estate, and there would have to be a significant disincentive for any collusion between them that does not objectively benefit the ward.

Oh, I see.

1. ???? 2. ???? 3. Now we staff the whole system with attentive, caring, intelligent people who have time to spend on each case.

Sure, at some point, a judge might need to make a ruling that indeed someone should submit to guardianship.

That point is not at an ex-parte hearing as the very first step in the process. The Clark County guardianship commissioner, Jon Norheim. Seems to be at the heart of this. His bad rulings are how the system was not able to prevent this stuff from happening. Some blame also lies with the apparent lack of any appeal options against his decisions.

I agree. I'm not sure how anyone was willing to set up the rules and laws such that it was so easy to make such a ruling.

One such hearing took just over a minute. You could likely drag out a parking ticket hearing longer than that

For starters, involve the people and their families instead of excluding them by force. How can you possibly determine whether someone needs protection without hearing from them or those nearest them?

That's a problem in instances where parts of the family is in denial about the parent's state. For instance, my grandfather is struggling with Alzheimer's, but my grandmother is combative about it, along with a few family members. This means, instead of my grandfather regularly seeing a doctor and getting some sort of treatment, he continues to degrade, day by day, including even driving around on his own. Driving seems perfectly fine on a good day, but if he were to experience a serious episode while out on his own, he could strand himself out in the middle of nowhere and die from exposure.

In fact, this isn't hypothetical, this exact scenario happened just the other week to an old priest from the exact same small (less than 5000 people) town

Well, for a start it’s really the sort of thing that probably shouldn’t be done by the private sector. In the system described, the private operator is essentially incentivised to abuse the person they’re supposed to be taking care of.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com