* Nearly 20 percent of elderly people in Broward who are thrust into a guardianship proceeding from a hospital bed die within 34 days, before they ever make it to court for a hearing to determine whether they are competent to run their own lives.

This death rate appears far higher than in Dade, where it's tougher to rush someone into a guardianship without a long court proceeding. The disparity suggests that some Broward patients may be discharged, or readied for discharge, before they are well enough to leave the hospital.

* Elderly people who may be temporarily disoriented after an illness or accident are sometimes stripped of their rights and rushed into life-changing guardianships even though they do not meet the legal definition of incapacitation.

* Men and women compelled to pay guardians $30 to $75 an hour -- bills they have lost their legal right to fight -- could, in some cases, manage their own lives if they had the help of an aide paid just $80 per day.

* Social workers and other relatively untrained discharge planners, not doctors, decide to call in guardians at some hospitals. Jablonsky's doctor of 12 years, for example, did not know she had a guardian following her hospital stay last year until she told him, he said.

* Some elderly people receive deplorable treatment after they leave the hospital with a guardian. State elder abuse watchdogs found a former Broward General Medical Center patient tied to a chair with a sheet in a Fort Lauderdale boarding home just weeks after the hospital paid a guardian company $1,800 to initiate guardianship and help place him in an appropriate facility.

* Patient confidentiality is violated routinely. Without the consent of their elderly patients, hospitals provide information about their medical problems to guardians. The guardians use that knowledge in court to have the patient declared incapacitated, stripped of rights and placed in their care.

"(The hospitals) have made patsies out of us," said Broward Circuit Judge Jack Musselman, who as a probate judge is responsible for approving and overseeing guardianships. "They have found a way to dump their problems on us."

James A. Pearson, an experienced guardianship attorney, once saw little wrong with hospitals paying guardians to come into their patients' lives uninvited but is now disturbed by the practice.

"After a while, I began saying, 'Isn't there a bit of a stink rising when it becomes an industry?' " Pearson said.

The industry works like this:

Professional guardians make a living by asking judges to declare elderly or disabled people incapacitated and to place them in their care.

Under state law, professional guardians are not licensed or regulated. Almost anyone over 18 can become one.

Once individual guardians or guardian companies win control of elderly persons, they can pay themselves handsomely -- up to $41.50 an hour in Broward and $75 an hour in Dade -- from the elderly person's bank accounts with court approval.

One of the tougher aspects of the job, many guardians say, is finding new customers, elderly people in decline.

South Florida hospitals have an endless supply.

On the day in August that professional guardian Jacinth Preston was arrested and charged with grand theft, forgery and credit card fraud, she was scheduled to give a seminar on the rules and regulations of guardianship for the case managers of Northwest Regional Hospital in Margate.