If New York Gets Aging Right, Guardianship Should Become Obsolete

A Promise with a Powerful Implication

New York State’s Master Plan for Aging is a rare and hopeful document. It recognizes something our public systems too often forget: older adults are not problems to be managed, but citizens whose dignity, autonomy, and participation define the moral health of our state. If fully implemented, the Plan can transform aging in New York from a system of scarcity into one grounded in stability, care, and self-determination.

That promise carries a powerful implication: if the Plan succeeds, guardianship should become obsolete, and supported decision-making should emerge as the humane, fiscally responsible standard of care.

Legal Erasure of Personhood

Every day in New York courtrooms, people lose core civil rights without being accused of a crime. They are neither convicted nor sentenced. They are declared in need of “help.” Through adult guardianship, a judge may transfer authority over where a person lives, how their money is spent, what medical care they receive, and often whom they may see. This is not social services; it is a legal erasure of personhood.

The consequences are profound. Guardianship has become one of the most persistent violations of civil, constitutional, and human rights in the United States. It directly contradicts a core principle of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD): people retain legal capacity on an equal basis with others and must receive supports to exercise rights, not substitutes to replace them.

The United States signed that treaty in 2009 but never ratified it. New York does not need Washington’s permission to honor its truth: disability does not extinguish rights. The state has already begun, however slowly, to move toward a different model.

Awareness Day and the Ordinary Courtroom

That urgency is underscored today. February 1 is National Conservatorship and Guardianship Abuse Awareness Day, recognized and advanced by the American Bar Association through its Commission on Law and Aging — a reminder that abuse is not rare, cinematic, or confined to celebrity cases, but embedded in ordinary courtrooms, sealed files, and rushed hearings across the country. Awareness exists because the harm is real, recurring, and systemic.

When the Standard Collapses

Guardianship is supposed to be careful and rare. Under Mental Hygiene Law Article 81, courts must find both incapacity and a likelihood of harm without intervention. In practice, that standard often collapses into biomedical fragments: a brief cognitive screen, a hospital note, or a hurried clinical opinion. Function is confused with diagnosis. Needing support is mistaken for incapacity. But needing help does not mean losing the right to decide.

As national experts have repeatedly documented, fundamental due process is often absent. Respondents are frequently unrepresented. Hearings may last minutes. The deprivation of constitutional rights can occur with less procedural protection than a minor criminal offense. This is not an aberration; it is a structural failure.

Guardianship as a Signal of Unmet Obligations

This is why guardianship should not be treated as a safety net; it is a signal of unmet social obligations. It appears when housing systems fail to stabilize tenancy, when hospitals lack care coordination, when benefits administration collapses, and when social isolation is mistaken for incapacity. These are not personal failures; they are system collapses. And each is precisely what the Master Plan for Aging is designed to correct.

The Plan emphasizes affordable housing, nutrition access, community health services, caregiver support, transportation, and coordinated delivery of care. These are not extras. They are the infrastructure of autonomy. A person who is housed, nourished, medically supported, and socially connected does not need to surrender legal rights in order to survive.

New York Has Already Begun

New York has already begun to move in this direction.

In 2012, a state court described guardianship as a “draconian loss of liberty” and terminated a plenary order after finding supported decision-making sufficient. In 2022, the Legislature enacted Article 82, formally recognizing Supported Decision-Making (SDM) Agreements. These were not symbolic gestures. They were acknowledgments that guardianship is a policy choice, not an inevitability.

Stabilizing Measure, Not Destination

The Good Guardianship Act reflects another serious and compassionate recognition that the current system is under-resourced. But it should be understood as a stabilizing measure, not a destination. Improving the administration of guardianship may reduce harm in the short term, but expanding it risks institutionalizing the very failure the Master Plan seeks to undo. The true success of the Master Plan will not be measured by how many guardians are funded, but by how few New Yorkers ultimately require one.

The Infrastructure of Autonomy

Supported decision-making offers the model. It recognizes that most people, including those with disabilities and cognitive changes, can make their own decisions when given appropriate assistance. This is not radical; it is how all of us live. We consult doctors, lawyers, and loved ones every day. We use help to exercise our rights, not to surrender them.

Funding housing, nutrition, and SDM facilitators is not charity; it is an investment in freedom. This is why full funding matters. Aging services still receive only a small share of public budgets, even as millions of older New Yorkers depend on them. Senior centers struggle with deteriorating facilities. Meal programs remain under-resourced. Hundreds of thousands sit on waiting lists for affordable housing. Food insecurity persists. These conditions predict guardianship long before any judge enters the picture.

The argument for reform is as much a fiscal reality as it is a moral one. Predatory and routine guardianships consistently accelerate the path to institutionalization, which exponentially increases public expenditures. Community-based services are not just a compassionate choice; they are the more effective and economically responsible alternative. The data is clear.

• Housing support costs significantly less than a nursing home bed.

• Nutrition programs cost a fraction of an emergency room admission.

• Caregiver assistance is an investment that avoids the staggering costs of guardianship litigation.

When we choose to fund the infrastructure of autonomy, we are choosing the only fiscally sustainable path for New York’s future.

Momentum, and What Must Follow

Momentum is finally building. Reform can draw on the Fourth National Guardianship Summit, Maximizing Autonomy and Ensuring Accountability (May 10–14, 2021), hosted by Syracuse University College of Law.

In November, New York City Councilmember Frank Morano introduced a bill to create a guardianship reform commission. That effort should be a catalyst for statewide action, not a substitute for it. Article 81 and Surrogate’s Court Procedure Act Article 17-A must ultimately be rewritten around rights, not paternalism.

The Age Strong Coalition’s call for full funding of the Master Plan — marked by advocates gathering at the Capitol on February 10 [2026] to demand implementation — reflects this deeper truth: aging policy and guardianship reform are not separate agendas. They rise or fall together.

The question before New York is larger than a funding debate. It is philosophical. Do we want a future in which aging is managed through legal substitution, or one in which aging is supported through social investment?

If New York takes its Master Plan seriously, guardianship should not be expanded; it should be rendered obsolete.

New York is judged by how it treats the people whose rights are easiest to take. A state that values equality cannot sustain a system that turns disability or age into civil erasure.

We already know what works. We have begun to build it. No New Yorker is too disabled to have rights. The Master Plan for Aging will decide whether New Yorkers grow old as citizens with agency — or as subjects of the state.