Marshall Kapp Discusses Legal and Pecuniary Aspects of Family Caregiving

I‘m always playing catch-up on my “must read” list, but fortunately, others keep me on task.  One such article is Florida State Medicine and Law Professor Marshall Kapp’s piece, inspired in part by Hendrik Hartog’s 2012 book, Someday All This Will Be Yours. 

In For Love, Legacy, Or Pay: Legal and Pecuniary Aspects of Family Caregiving, published by the Springer Journals of Case Management, Professor Kapp begins with this overview and note of caution about legal planning:

Most caregiving and companionship provided by family members and friends to elder individuals in home environments occurs because of the caregiver’s feelings of ethical and emotional obligation and attachment.  From a legal perspective, though, it might be ill-advised for an informal caregiver to admit to such a motivation.

He advises consideration of personal service or personal service agreements, explaining:

We must reject an analytically attractive and pure, but never really socially realistic, tendency to dichotomize the caregiver experience, recognizing instead that a person may simultaneously be both a family member, with the related emotional and ethical connotations of that label, and a business employee.  Morality and materiality are not incompatible.  Caregiving can be both an act of love and a marketable commodity bought and sold between non-strangers.

As Professor Kapp points out, if we as a society really wanted to encourage family caregiving without all too vague promises about future inheritances, we could go beyond mere tax credits and “instead use public funds to pay family caregivers directly.”