Beyond Advance Directives — Health Care Surrogate Laws

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Abstract
Encouraging patients to execute advance directives is a worthy goal. Although such documents are certainly not perfect and may in many instances be difficult to interpret,1 it is usually much easier to determine and respect a patient's wishes when there is an advance directive than when the patient has left no indication of his or her wishes.2 The importance of advance directives seems to be growing. Nonetheless, there is a fundamental limitation to their usefulness: relatively few people are likely ever to execute them. Certainly, the results before the enactment of the Patient Self-Determination Act, which became effective last December, . . .