Source: https://judicialsupport.wordpress.com/tag/insurance/
Timestamp: 2020-06-02 18:35:20
Document Index: 96080622

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 3323', '§ 3323', '§3323', '§1926', '§3323', '§ 164']

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Historically, when a husband and wife were in the process of being divorced and one died their status remained as if married, and division of the probate marital property would occur under the probate rules of Title 20. Effective January 28, 2005, the foregoing changed, and equitable distribution under certain circumstances may now occur even after one of the spouses has died.
Title 23 now provides that “[I]n the event one party dies during the course of divorce proceedings, no decree of divorce has been entered and grounds have been established as provided in subsection (g), the parties’ economic rights and obligations arising under the marriage shall be determined under this part rather than under 20 Pa.C.S. (relating to decedents, estates and fiduciaries).” 23 Pa.C.S.A. § 3323(d.1). The Official Note indicates that the primary reasons for the changes is so that parties who are divorcing would need not choose between equitable distribution or electing against the Will of the other spouse. Indeed, the Official Notes state that “[T]he parties’ economic rights and obligations are determined under equitable distribution principles, not under the elective share provisions of Chapter 22 of Title 20 (Decedents, Estates and Fiduciaries Code).” Importantly, the change to Title 23 leaves several questions unanswered, that have yet to be clarified by the courts.
It is universally accepted that a divorce decree cannot be entered, regardless of the approval of the divorce grounds, when one of the spouses in the divorce action dies, because a divorce action abates immediately upon the death of one of the parties. The changes to 23 Pa.C.S.A. § 3323(d.1) does not alter the foregoing. Taper V. Taper, 939 A.2d 969 (Pa. Super., 2007), Yelenic v. Clark, 922 A.2d 935 (Pa. Super., 2007), In Re Estate of James A. Bullotta, Jr., 838 A.2d 594 (Pa., 2003). Therefore, regardless of the approval of divorce grounds, the parties remain married.
If the parties remain married, regardless of grounds of divorce being established, then any item of property that passes by law to the surviving spouse, because they are the surviving spouse, must supercede equitable distribution. Of particular note are retirement plans, such as IRA or 401(k) plans that are generally governed by ERISA, which of course is a federal statute that does not fall within Title 20. Frequently, pension plans stipulate that if a spouse is named as a beneficiary, their name cannot be removed without their consent. The same might be the case for life insurance provided as an employment benefit through the decedent’s employer. Likewise, a tenancy by the entireties is created and governed by common law and not Title 20. Consequently, assets passing outside Title 20 may not be subject to equitable distribution after the death of a spouse.
23 Pa.C.S.A. §3323(d.1) did not take effect until January 28, 2005. Left unresolved is whether the change to Title 23 effects parties who separate prior to the effective state of the statute, and whether the change to Title 23 should be applied to parties when one of the parties filed for divorce prior to the effective date of the statute. Under 1 Pa.C.S.A. §1926, no statute is to be considered retroactive unless it is clearly and manifestly so intended by the General Assembly. Indeed, “in the absence of clear language to the contrary, statutes must be construed to operate prospectively only.” Budnick v. Budnick, 419 Pa.Super. 172, 615 A.2d 80 (Pa.Super.,1992.) citing Flick v. Flick, 408 Pa.Super. 110, 115-117, 596 A.2d 216, 219-220 (1991). There is nothing in §3323(d.1) that even hints at retroactive effect; therefore the statute may not apply to those individuals who separated prior to January 28, 2005.
Attorneys who practice in the field of family law should be aware that if the parties separated after January 28, 2005, and one of the spouses is ill, consideration should be made to obtaining a finding of grounds for divorce, depending on the assets involved and how they are held. Those attorneys who practice in the field of estate law need to make certain they are aware of this change in the law, the need to update wills, and the need to check the records of the Register of Wills to determine if a Personal Representative is appointed. Consideration should be made to filing an informal caveat to block probate of any will, and a formal caveat then filed and a petition filed to appoint an independent administrator pendente lite to marshal the assets of the deceased spouse’s estate, to ensure that the other spouse is not left with nothing.
Here is yet another an article, by Adam S. Bernick, Esquire, who is of counsel to my firm, providing some sound advice and insight into the estate planning process. This article was originally published in Upon Further Review on December 8, 2009, and can be seen here.
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What happens when an individual never removed his divorced spouse as a beneficiary of his employer’s Savings and Investment Plan (SIP) and then dies? The recent U. S. Supreme Court case of Kennedy v. DuPont, 129 S.Ct. 865, 172 L.Ed.2d 662 (1/26/2009) answered this question in a unanimous decision authored by Justice Souter. The Court determined the plan document controlled what happened to the benefits. If the plan document stipulated release of the money to the divorced spouse, regardless of a non-QDRO divorce decree directing otherwise, because the decedent neglected to change the designated beneficiary from the now divorced spouse to another individual, then the plan administrators acted correctly when they released the money to the divorced spouse and not to the estate.
The decedent, William, worked for DuPont and participated in a SIP. Under the SIP, William retained the power to designate any beneficiary or beneficiaries to receive all or part of the funds upon his death, and to replace or revoke such designation. Importantly, under the SIP when William died, if he did not have a surviving spouse and a beneficiary designation was not in effect, distribution would be made to the executor or administrator of his estate. Implicit in the foregoing, of course, is that if William never amended his beneficiary designation to remove his now divorced spouse, it would remain in effect.
In 1971, William married Liv, and, in 1974, he signed a form designating her to take benefits under the SIP. William did not name a contingent beneficiary to take if she disclaimed her interest. William and Liv divorced in 1994. The divorce decree (apparently non-QDRO) provided for divorce of the parties, and specifically divested Liv of her rights in any of William’s retirement plans. However, William did not execute any documents removing Liv as the beneficiary of the SIP, although he did execute a new beneficiary-designation form naming his daughter, Kari, as the beneficiary under DuPont’s Pension and Retirement Plan. On William’s death in 2001, petitioner Kari was named executrix and she asked DuPont to distribute the SIP funds to William’s Estate. DuPont relied on William’s designation form and paid the balance of some $400,000 to Liv.
Litigation occurred and the matter eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court granted certiorari to resolve a split among the appellate courts and state supreme courts with regards to a divorced spouse’s ability to waive pension plan benefits through a divorce decree not amounting to a QDRO and whether a beneficiary’s federal common law “waiver” of plan benefits would be effective where the waiver was inconsistent with plan documents.
The Court held that regardless of any waiver under federal common law, the plan administrator was correct in not granting Liv’s “waiver”. Instead the Court held that the plan administrator “did its statutory ERISA duty” by paying the benefits to Liv in conformity with the plan documents. The Court reasoned that ERISA compliance is governed by the plain language of the written documents, and that plan administrators should not have to review a multiple amount of documents prior to release of the benefits.
Family law attorneys need to make sure that if there is no QDRO they take action to make their clients aware if the consequences of not changing the beneficiary designation. If there is a QDRO, the plan administrators must be made aware of the QDRO promptly so that the plan records/beneficiary designation is modified to reflect the terms of the QDRO. Estate planning attorneys need to review their clients’ beneficiary designations to make sure that they still comply with their estate plan goals.
By Adam S. Bernick, Esquire, Law Office of Adam S. Bernick and of counsel to the Law Office of Faye Riva Cohen, P.C. and published in Upon Further Review on November 10, 2009.
The Medical Authorization Process Under HIPPA: Protection or Burden?
We will not accept the authorization for the release of medical records that you had your client complete; he must complete our authorization instead, because of HIPAA. “The patient must physically come to our office and sign our authorization in person in order for our office to release medical records to the patient or anyone else because of HIPAA. “I can’t talk to you at all about your client’s health condition because of HIPAA. These are common phrases I have heard from health care providers when trying to gather evidence for a client’s case.
The word “HIPAA” has become synonymous with patient privacy. This privacy concept comes from the Privacy Rule, which developed out of a Congressional mandate for the adoption of Federal privacy protections for individually identifiable health information. In the Administrative Simplification provisions, Sections 261-264, of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (“HIPAA”) of 1996, Public Law 104-191, Congress directed the Secretary of Health and Human Services to establish these Federal privacy protections.
The HIPAA Administrative Simplification provisions directed the Secretary of Health and Human Services to adopt national standards for electronic health care transactions. To ensure that this new information sharing would not jeopardize patient privacy, Section 264 of HIPAA directed the Secretary of Health and Human Services to establish Federal privacy protections for individually identifiable health information. Thus, the Secretary drafted the Privacy Rule and required compliance, for most covered entities, by April 14, 2003. Covered entities include health plans, health care clearinghouses, and health care providers.
According to the Privacy Rule, a valid authorization for the release of protected health information is required when an attorney is requesting his client’s medical information from a health care provider. See 45 C.F.R. § 164.508 (2003). The general requirements for a valid authorization include:
a description of the protected health information to be used or disclosed
the names of person(s) or class of persons authorized to make requested use or disclosure
the names of person(s) or class of persons to whom the covered entity may make the requested use or disclosure
an expiration date or expiration event
notification to the patient of his right to revoke, how to exercise that right, and the exceptions to the right to revoke
notification of the ability or inability to condition treatment, payment, or enrollment for benefits on signing the authorization
an explanation of the potential for the information to be disclosed to another by the recipient and no longer be protected
Although these authorization rules may be followed by an attorney’s office, it does not guarantee cooperation from health care providers. Any attorney, or support staff, who has attempted to gather a client’s medical documentation to prove his case has undoubtedly heard the phrase “HIPAA” countless times, as a rebuttal to providing documentation.
Some may say that the Privacy Rule has empowered patients to have more control over their health information. However, the way the Privacy Rule functions in the attorney-client context is anything but empowering, because clients who want their attorneys to have unlimited access to their health information are burdened by the barriers their health providers place on the collection of this important information. Fear of penalties, misunderstanding of the Privacy Rule, and possibly a general dislike of the legal profession may all contribute to the apprehensiveness or unwillingness of certain health care providers to assist a law office with the development of a client/patient’s case. Whatever the rationale may be, this lack of cooperation can disadvantage a client’s case by delaying the receipt of essential evidence.
One example of how this lack of cooperation can disadvantage a client’s case occurred when our office was attempting to gather medical records from a hospital for a Social Security Disability case. These records illustrated when and how our client began suffering from auditory hallucinations, paranoia, and depression. The client spent a week at the hospital in an attempt to stabilize her psychiatric symptoms. These records were imperative for proving to the administrative law judge that this client was no longer able to work due to the onset of her mental conditions.
Our office went through the standard process of calling the hospital to inquire as to where to send a request for medical records. We prepared a detailed request and sent it to the medical records department along with a HIPAA compliant authorization that we had our client review and sign. In response to this request, the medical records department refused to accept our authorization and informed us that a hospital authorization would need to be completed by the patient (even though it is extremely difficult to even get this client to answer her telephone, let alone fill out more paperwork). The client also had a disability advocate, who in the meantime hand delivered a request for medical records. When she followed up with her request, she was informed that there was no record of such a request.
Our office continued to attempt to receive these much-needed records. We made sure all of the requested paperwork was completed and sent another request for medical records to the medical records department. We called their office daily to ensure that our second request was received and responded to. When we finally were told that it was received, we were informed that we were missing the required hospital authorization. We explained that the requested authorization was enclosed and that now the hearing was quickly approaching, so we needed their assistance with this matter. We spoke with the supervisor who could not assist us further because of “HIPAA”. The department would not expedite the process in any way and their only suggestion was to resend everything again and then wait to see what happens.
Since we had our client’s interest in mind and wanted to make sure the judge had ample time to review these important medical records prior to the hearing, we were forced to go beyond the medical records staff and talk to hospital administration. After several telephone calls and letters, we were able to set up a time to pick up these medical records. We were glad we went through all of the trouble of obtaining this documentation because we ultimately won the case for the client and these records assisted us in proving the elements of her case. However, our office was forced to spend a great amount of time and energy conducting the seemingly simple task of gathering a client’s medical records. This type of delay obviously can have a negative financial impact on a client and could be extremely detrimental to a client’s case. Unfortunately, this hospital staff’s behavior is just one example of how some health care providers function under the guise of protecting patient privacy.
Although it would be ideal for patients to be able to gather their medical information without the assistance of an attorney, often times it is necessary for an attorney to handle this part of the legal process on behalf of their clients (e.g., handling disability cases where a client has difficulty remembering tasks or physically visiting a doctor’s office).
Attorneys are required to provide diligent representation to their clients and need the cooperation of health care providers to meet this obligation. Although the protection of patient privacy is clearly an important goal, in practice it appears that the real world application of HIPAA’s Privacy Rule is more of a burden on clients and their counsel than a protection of clients’ rights.
By: Samantha Bogin, Esquire and published on July 10, 2006 in The Legal Intelligencer.
by James Shupe published on March 10, 2019 in The Daily Signal and can be found here.
By Victor Davis Hanson and published on October 10, 2019 and can be found here.
Perhaps long hours are part of an arms race for status and income among the moneyed elite. Or maybe the logic here isn’t economic at all. It’s emotional—even spiritual. The best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want, have chosen the office for the same reason that devout Christians attend church on Sundays: It’s where they feel most themselves. “For many of today’s rich there is no such thing as ‘leisure’; in the classic sense—work is their play,” the economist Robert Frank wrote in TheWall Street Journal. “Building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”
In the past century, the American conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers to callings—from necessity to status to meaning. In an agrarian or early-manufacturing economy, where tens of millions of people perform similar routinized tasks, there are no delusions about the higher purpose of, say, planting corn or screwing bolts: It’s just a job.The rise of the professional class and corporate bureaucracies in the early 20th century created the modern journey of a career, a narrative arc bending toward a set of precious initials: VP, SVP, CEO. The upshot is that for today’s workists, anything short of finding one’s vocational soul mate means a wasted life.
While it’s inadvisable to paint 85 million people with the same brush, it’s fair to say that American Millennials have been collectively defined by two external traumas. The first is student debt. Millennials are the most educated generation ever, a distinction that should have made them rich and secure. But rising educational attainment has come at a steep price. Since 2007, outstanding student debt has grown by almost $1 trillion, roughly tripling in just 12 years. And since the economy cratered in 2008, average wages for young graduates have stagnated—making it even harder to pay off loans.The second external trauma of the Millennial generation has been the disturbance of social media, which has amplified the pressure to craft an image of success—for oneself, for one’s friends and colleagues, and even for one’s parents. But literally visualizing career success can be difficult in a services and information economy. Blue-collar jobs produce tangible products, like coal, steel rods, and houses. The output of white-collar work—algorithms, consulting projects, programmatic advertising campaigns—is more shapeless and often quite invisible. It’s not glib to say that the whiter the collar, the more invisible the product.
3. TIME FOR HAPPINESSThis is the right time for a confession. I am the very thing that I am criticizing.
On a deeper level, Americans have forgotten an old-fashioned goal of working: It’s about buying free time. The vast majority of workers are happier when they spend more hours with family, friends, and partners, according to researchconducted by Ashley Whillans, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. In one study, she concluded that the happiest young workers were those who said around the time of their college graduation that they preferred careers that gave them time away from the office to focus on their relationships and their hobbies.
By Derek Thompson and published on February 24, 2019 in The Atlantic and can be found here.
Perhaps Brexit was inevitable as soon as they started confiscating butchers’ scales.
The battle between metric and “imperial” or “customary” measurement, recently taken up again by “anti-metrite” pundits James Panero and Tucker Carlson, shows there’s a real world apart from our representations of it. It all makes no sense, of course, unless there’s stuff in the world—liquids, for example, or the distances between this and that—that can be measured in various ways without being altered by the measurement.
That metric and imperial are convertible into one another, in other words, presupposes that there are real facts outside of our heads and cultural practices. That might cause consternation among postmodernists, narrativists, Absolute Idealists, social constructionists, and phenomenologists everywhere, showing them to be trapped in a world they never made. Deep in their hearts, they already know they are.
On the other hand, even though they don’t create worlds, things like systems of measurement do reflect and shape us. They alter rulers, measuring cups, signage, and scales, for example. So though the recent resurgence of devotion to Fahrenheit, cups and gallons, yards and miles, pounds and ounces, bushels and pecks, makes no difference with regard to the nature of the world, it expresses something about us, about how we encounter the one reality we all inhabit, and about who we actually are and who we want to convince ourselves that we are.
In that sense, I assert that metric, as a system for measuring all things, yields an unfortunate and in some sense misleading way of experiencing the world. It represents a kind of wishful thinking.
One way to express my objections is in terms of aesthetics. Traditional measurements are eccentric and complexly interrelated, having emerged over centuries for various purposes. They are connected explicitly to the human body: the foot as a foot, the yard as a stride, and so forth. I might compare the picture of the world they yield to the paintings of Rembrandt: complex, human, uneven, with a light (not to be measured exhaustively in lumens) that both reveals and obscures.
We might think of the metric system, on the other hand, as more along the lines of neo-classicism like that of Jacques-Louis David or even minimalism a la Mondrian or Donald Judd: the result of a kind of brutal rationalization of experience that tries to make the world into a reflection of human logic or even to reduce the world to something immediately (and delusory) comprehensible. It’s an attempt to box the universe up and rake it with klieg lights, destroying all shadows.
Neither system, in short, is the exclusive truth, and neither is merely falsifying, though each might reveal things that the other conceals, particularly in the relation of the units of measurement to one another within each system. But the traditional measures yield a more beautiful and a richer experience, or rather—as things stand now—resist a brutal authoritarian simplification.
Any system of measurement is rationally arbitrary. The basic measures could be entirely different and no less reasonable or useful or true. For example, if the meter were 2.317 times as long as it is now, and the entire system of measures adjusted accordingly, the system as a whole would be no less accurate, no less rational (though no more), and no less useful. But the liter, the Celsius degree, the lumen are dedicated to the delusion that we can understand the world by reducing it to decimal notation, and are dedicated as well to producing the illusion that this complex, little-understood universe can be counted on your fingers.
There’s no particular relation of reality to a base-10 mathematics, as Panero points out. The world does not appear to us, or exist, in any relation at all to base-10 mathematics. If you gather up a thousand meters you get a kilometer: that bears no more relation to reality in itself than 5280 feet to the mile, or a base-12 system of inches and feet. Or I might assay the position that the 10x100x1000 system bears less relation to reality than more seemingly arbitrary systems, because the world is infinitely complex and by and large not symmetrical.
The metric system is dedicated above all to disguising its own irrational basis. And people have used it to demand this merely-apparent reasonableness from ourselves, and to force the world to reflect it. Perhaps it’s somewhat easier to learn and master than some other systems, but children ultimately do fine with whatever system they learn.
The traditional measures yield a more beautiful, subtle, more complex and richer experience of the one reality that both systems weigh or seek to describe. If so, they also yield a more truthful system, not because the metric system does not describe reality, but because it induces the delusion of comprehension, or seems to promise a fully comprehensible world, which is the kind of thing no system of measurement can deliver. And it encourages the self-delusion of people—such as the government officials who enforce it—who regard themselves as more rational than the people on whom it is enforced.
For the metric system, ironically, has become extremely imperialistic. Many people think it’s obvious that it should be imposed on every society, including American and British society, by law. Indeed, it has already been imposed in the UK as a condition of entry into the EU. This is a sort of representational colonialism; it asserts that everyone must measure the world, must represent and experience it, in the same way. That is of the essence of oppression. And the assertion of universal rationality underlying it is politically problematic, and also false.
As a condition of the UK integrating into the EU, it was required to demonstrate the essence of the metric system: enforcement and capitulation. Measurement police started confiscating scales marked in pounds and ounces. I recall the response of one British butcher back around 2000: “They better bring big men.” They did. Perhaps Brexit was inevitable from that moment. The Independent, reporting that butchers are beginning to measure in lbs again, quotes the UK Metric Association (whatever that is exactly) describing its preferred measures as “powerful and wide-ranging, a world standard and a proper system.” A proper system to be enforced upon an improper universe and unsystematic persons.
The French revolutionaries who, in a kind of Enlightenment ecstasy, first imposed the system, thought of themselves as overcoming a God-and-tradition-ridden ignorance, as emerging finally from the Dark Ages. They were merely deluded: about the nature of the world, but above all about the nature of themselves.
By Crispin Sartwell and published on June 24, 2019 and can be found here.