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« And the Beat Goes On | Main | Running Out of Time »
October 8, 2007 |Permalink |Comments (0)
Smack Down
The Gimp Parade lays a smack down on private, for-profit investors who are, increasingly speculating in the nursing home real estate market. Blogger Kay Olsen highlights the following from the recent New York Times article that covered this issue.
"The typical nursing home acquired by a large investment company before 2006 scored worse than national rates in 12 of 14 indicators that regulators use to track ailments of long-term residents. Those ailments include bedsores and easily preventable infections, as well as the need to be restrained. Before they were acquired by private investors, many of those homes scored at or above national averages in similar measurements."
What does she want to do about this?
"One of the demands of ADAPT at the recent sit-in at the Chicago headquarters of the American Medical Association [see the AMA's policy on the use of restraints in nursing homes here-- WHT] was that doctors divest themselves of financial interest in the nursing homes they recommend to their clients."
I agree with and support ADAPT's position on the divestment issue.
"While there is a movement by aging Boomers gaining steam to make nursing and assisted living institutions into communities where people can go to live happily instead of going there to wither of neglect and die, a key factor in the injustices visited upon the people who end up in these homes is that continued institutionalization with minimal service and minimal care financially benefits someone else."
When you get down to it, the paragraph above is the core of a moral argument against health care as a purely profit-driven "marketplace" and for the enlargement and preservation of human dignity and freedom of choice as a fundamental human right.
When the profits of corporations in the medical-industrial sector come to take precedence over the life and death needs of ordinary citizens we have a prescription for disaster.