Some 70% of nursing homes are now corporate operations run by absentee executives who have no experience in nursing homes and are guided by one thing: profit.
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.
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, and good nursing homes help gentle this time. In the past couple of decades, though, an entirelyforce 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% of nursing homes are now corporate operations run by absentee executives who have no experience in nursing homes and who're guided by the market imperative of maximizing investor profits.
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.
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."Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the books "Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow" and "There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos: A Work of Political Subversion" .
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