Health Care Proxy

Ezra Klein points to an interesting article on the KaiserNetwork.Org that reviews a recent study in the August edition of the Journal of General Internal Medicine.  The study discusses the unexpected people who are selected to be health care proxies when individuals are asked by their doctors for emergency contacts and proxies.  Some of the findings:

28% of participants selected someone other than their emergency contacts;

One-third of married participants did not select their spouses;

Participants selected their daughters three times more often than their sons and their sisters two times more often than their brothers; and

About one-fourth of participants said that physicians had never previously asked them to select a proxy.

Since I don't have any daughters, perhaps I need to start talking to my friends in more detail about my health care wishes . . . .  On a more serious note, I did find the comments on Ezra's blog below the article to be very revealing and informative.