Don't trust Wall Street with nursing homes
There
are industries that occasionally do something rotten. And there are industries
like Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Big Tobacco that persistently do rotten things.
(Illustration created with Getty Images)
Then
there is the nursing home industry — where rottenness has become a core
business principle.
The
end-of-life experience can be rotten enough on its own, with an assortment of
natural indignities bedeviling us. Good nursing homes help patients gently
through this time. In the past couple of decades, though, an entirely unnatural force
has come to dominate the delivery of aged care: profiteering corporate chains
and Wall Street speculators.
The
very fact that this essential and sensitive social function, which ought to be
the domain of health professionals and charitable enterprises, is now called an
“industry” reflects a total perversion of its purpose.
Some 70 percent of nursing homes are now
corporate operations, often run by absentee executives who have no experience
in nursing homes and who are guided by the market imperative of maximizing
investor profits. They constantly demand “efficiencies” from their facilities —
which invariably means reducing the number of nurses, which invariably reduces
care, which means more injuries, illness… and deaths.
As one nursing expert quoted by The New Yorker rightly says, “It’s criminal.”
But
it’s not against the law, since the industry’s lobbying front — a major donor
to congressional campaigns — effectively writes the laws, which allows
corporate hustlers to provide only one nurse on duty, no matter how many
patients are in the facility.
When
a humane nurse-staffing requirement was proposed last year, the lobby group
furiously opposed it… and Congress dutifully bowed to industry profits over
grandma’s decent end-time. After all, granny doesn’t make campaign donations.
So, as a health policy analyst bluntly puts it, “The only kind of groups that seem to be interested in investing in nursing homes are bad actors.” To help push for better, contact TheConsumerVoice.org.
OtherWords
columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.
This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.