By the time I retired as a lawyer specializing in estate planning and conservatorships, I must have drafted at least a thousand durable powers of attorney for health care. I want to offer five observations about how DPAHCs work, and several about how they do not work. I have come to realize that even the most thoughtfully drafted advance health care directives—including all those I wrote when I was practicing law and all those drafted by other attorneys that clients brought to me for review—have these holes.