Living will requirements in Colorado

Which document is this, really

Colorado actually recognizes two separate instruments. The first is the Declaration as to Medical Treatment, created under the state’s Colorado Medical Treatment Decision Act; most people call this a living will. The second is the Medical Durable Power of Attorney, created under the Colorado Patient Autonomy Act, and it is where you name your agent, the person who can make medical decisions for you if you cannot. Colorado does not force these into two separate signings: the Declaration statute says outright that you may combine it with a medical power of attorney to create a single document, and that combined document has to satisfy the requirements of both acts.

This page covers the Declaration and the Medical Durable Power of Attorney, the two documents you complete yourself, well before any hospital is involved. Colorado also runs a separate medical-order program for people already facing a serious illness, covered further down this page. This is exactly what Myend’s Healthcare Directive prepares for Colorado: your Declaration and your Medical Durable Power of Attorney, combined into one signed document.

Who can make one

You have to be 18, Colorado’s own definition of an adult for both the Declaration and the Medical Durable Power of Attorney. The Medical Treatment Decision Act does not carve out an exception for someone younger who is married or in the armed forces; eighteen is the only line that appears in its definitions. Capacity itself is not a diagnosis or a certificate you carry with you. What matters is that, at the moment you sign, you understand what the Declaration says, what naming an agent in the Medical Durable Power of Attorney means, and what both do once they take effect.

Signing it so it counts

The witnesses-or-notary rule belongs to the Declaration. Either two witnesses or a notary, on its own, makes your Declaration valid. The Colorado Patient Autonomy Act, read from beginning to end, asks for neither on a Medical Durable Power of Attorney: it has to be a written power of attorney that says the authority survives your disability, and that is the whole formality. Fold the two into one document, as the Declaration statute lets you do, and you sign that document to the Declaration’s rule, because a combined document has to satisfy the requirements of both acts.

1. 1Write it out and date it

   Set down your treatment wishes and, if you are combining the two, name your agent in the same document. Colorado does not require a state-printed form for either half.

2. 2Two witnesses, or a notary

   Sign in front of two witnesses, or skip the witnesses entirely and have your signature acknowledged before a notary public or another person authorized by law to take acknowledgments. Either one, alone, makes the Declaration valid.

3. 3Who cannot serve

   Neither a witness nor the notary can be your attending physician or any other physician, an employee of your attending physician or of the health care facility where you are a patient, a person with a claim against your estate, or a person who already stands to inherit from you, whether as a beneficiary under a will already in place or as an heir at law. The same four categories are barred from both roles.

Naming your agent

The person you name in your Medical Durable Power of Attorney is your agent. Read from beginning to end, the Colorado Patient Autonomy Act does not bar any category of person from serving in that role.

Two rules nearby are easy to mistake for a limit on who you may choose, and neither one is. First, if you name your spouse as agent and later divorce, that appointment is automatically revoked unless your document says it should not be, which is a rule about what happens after you sign, not about who you may name to begin with. Second, Colorado separately bars your attending physician from serving as your proxy, the fallback decision-maker a physician turns to only when a patient named no agent at all. A proxy is not an agent you chose; it is the state’s backup plan for someone who chose nobody. Neither rule stops you from naming your spouse, your adult child, a friend, or almost anyone else you trust as your actual agent.

When it takes effect

Two physicians, not one, stand between your Declaration and any withdrawal of treatment. When your attending physician is presented with an unrevoked Declaration and believes you have a terminal condition or are in a persistent vegetative state and lack decisional capacity, that physician has to order you examined by one other physician. Colorado’s definition of a qualified patient says the same thing from the other side: someone certified by the attending physician and one other physician. If both find the condition and the lack of capacity, they certify it in writing and enter it in your medical record together with a copy of your Declaration.

Two more steps follow the certificate. If your attending physician knows the whereabouts of your agent, your spouse, a designated beneficiary, an adult child, a parent, a sibling, or anyone else you designated in writing, the physician must immediately make a reasonable effort to notify at least one of them that a certificate has been signed. Then, if nobody has filed an action challenging the Declaration within 48 hours of the certification, the attending physician withdraws or withholds life-sustaining procedures according to its terms.

Your Medical Durable Power of Attorney works on a different switch. An agent named there may consent to or refuse medical treatment on behalf of a principal who lacks decisional capacity, and no agent may consent to or refuse treatment for you over your own objection.

If you are pregnant

Colorado’s law does not address pregnancy at all today. An older provision used to set a Declaration aside for the rest of a pregnancy if a doctor found the fetus viable, but the legislature repealed that provision outright in 2021. Nothing has taken its place.

In practice, that means your Declaration and your Medical Durable Power of Attorney apply exactly as written whether or not you are pregnant, with no automatic pause and no separate form to fill out about it. If you have read an older guide describing Colorado as a state that suspends a living will during pregnancy, that guide is describing law that no longer exists.

Changing or cancelling it

You can revoke your Declaration at any time, in any of several plain ways: say so out loud, put it in writing, or destroy the signed document yourself, by burning it, tearing it, canceling it, obliterating it, or otherwise destroying it. None of those routes need a new witness or a new notary.

The Medical Durable Power of Attorney has its own rules, and they sit in the Patient Autonomy Act rather than in the Declaration’s article. Nothing in that act or in the document itself can take away your right to revoke your agent’s authority, or your right to consent to or refuse any proposed treatment. Unless your document says otherwise, revoking the appointment, or an agent becoming unable or unwilling to serve, ends that appointment while leaving the rest of the document standing. And unless you expressly provide otherwise, a divorce, dissolution, annulment or legal separation automatically revokes the appointment of a spouse as your agent, again without disturbing anything else you wrote. Whichever route you take, tell your agent, your physician and your hospital, because a revocation nobody has heard of will not stop anyone acting on the paper they hold.

Making sure it is found

The most reliable way to make sure your Declaration and Medical Durable Power of Attorney are found when they matter is handing out signed copies yourself, to your agent, your regular physician, and the hospital you are most likely to use, then keeping the signed original somewhere your family already knows to check.

Colorado recognizes what you signed elsewhere. A declaration executed in compliance with the laws of the state where it was executed counts here, to the extent that it does not violate any laws of the state of Colorado, and a declaration that met Colorado’s own law when it was made stays effective. For the agent half, a medical durable power of attorney or similar instrument executed in another state is presumed to comply with Colorado’s act and may be relied on in good faith by a provider or facility here. Carrying a copy with you, and telling your agent exactly where the original lives, still does more for you than any of that.

This is not a POLST

Colorado’s own medical-order program for people already facing a serious illness is called MOST, Medical Orders for Scope of Treatment. A MOST form is signed together with a clinician after you are already living with a serious illness, and it becomes a standing medical order that travels with you between hospital, ambulance, and home. Your Declaration and Medical Durable Power of Attorney work the opposite way in timing: you complete them yourself, well in advance, with no clinician’s signature required. Myend prepares the Declaration and the Medical Durable Power of Attorney. It does not, and cannot, produce a MOST form; that has to come from a conversation with your own treating clinician.

What is different about Colorado

Colorado bars almost no one from serving as your agent, then quietly protects that choice with two rules that only look like eligibility limits.

The 2021 repeal deserves the lead, because it is the fact most likely to be wrong on an older page. Colorado’s Declaration once set itself aside for the rest of a pregnancy if a doctor found the fetus viable. Senate Bill 21-193 struck that provision from the law entirely, and nothing has taken its place. A Declaration signed today, or one signed years before the repeal and still in force, applies exactly as written, pregnant or not.

The more unusual story is the agent rule, because it is really an absence rather than a rule. Read the Colorado Patient Autonomy Act start to finish and no category of person is barred from serving as your agent, where most states keep at least the treating physician or facility staff out of the role. What exists instead are two narrower rules that only resemble eligibility limits: a divorce automatically ends a spouse’s appointment as agent unless the document says otherwise, and a physician is kept out of the separate fallback proxy role reserved for patients who named nobody. Mistake either one for a bar on who you may choose, and you would rule out people the law never touched.

Put together, Colorado is a state that lets its two documents merge into one signing, asks the least of you when choosing who speaks for you, and has quietly dropped a pregnancy rule that some older guides still describe as current.

Common questions

Sources and review