Should Older Individuals Be Entitled to a “Second Childhood”?

As more individuals survive for longer periods of time, these individuals have increasingly become the victims of various scams.  Should they have a defense of “old age” just like a young individual has the defense of “minority.”

This is one of the issues discussed in Charles Duhigg, Shielding Money Clashes With Elders’ Free Will, NY Times, Dec. 24, 2007, from which the following excerpts are taken:

In the last few years, thousands of older Americans * * * have filed suits against companies and salespeople who have promoted dubious offers and schemes. These suits are unusual because the victims typically do not say they were intimidated or lied to, and they concede they freely made what turned out to be unwise decisions.

But because the plaintiffs are older, they argue, they should be less accountable for their mistakes.

These lawsuits raise controversial questions: In the eyes of the law, should the elderly be treated like adolescents, who are not entirely responsible for their poor decisions, but are also barred from making certain choices on their own? Or should they have autonomy, and therefore be accountable for their blunders?

“Figuring out how to protect senior citizens from victimization, even when it’s caused by their own mistakes, is one of the most important issues facing us right now,” said Sharon Merriman-Nai of the National Center on Elder Abuse. “If we don’t solve this, millions of older people will suddenly be reliant on their families or the government.”

“But we also have to figure out how to balance our desire to protect vulnerable seniors with their rights to autonomy,” Ms. Merriman-Nai said. * * *

“There is no business on earth that can function if its customers can say, ‘I’m tired of abiding by this contract, so I want out because I’m old,’”  [Terry J. Dyer] added. * * *

“If the law says that anyone over 65 is suddenly mentally incapacitated, then older people will have trouble buying homes or cars or country club memberships or insurance policies,” said Frank Keating, chief executive of the American Council of Life Insurers, a trade organization.

Advocates for the elderly, however, say there has to be some kind of recognition that older consumers are more vulnerable.

“We know that, statistically, seniors are at enormous risk for fraud,” said A. Kimberley Dayton of the Center for Elder Justice and Policy at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. “It’s foolish to ignore that. But there’s also a huge dilemma in determining when someone is just being eccentric, versus someone who is a victim of undue influence.”