When ‘free enterprise’ doesn’t want to provide a social service it melts it down first. In the case of America’s nursing homes…
…the corporate sector uses its control over the federal government to create a regulatory system and funding system completely full of any and all holes possible.
Then it promptly sets out to loot the system it has set in place, all the while blaming the horrors taking place on the legal system and government agencies which are totally guided by them in the first place.
See the New York Times article today More Profit Less Nursing at Many Homes to catch a glimpse of this process at work.
Who loses besides the patients? That list is a long one. It includes family members, tax payers, and the workers caring for the elderly while the government and corporate administrators sabotage their care giving in every way imaginable. All come out losers excerpt the owners of the nursing home chains. They make their money at any rate.
Imagine how it hurts to work in such a hellhole? It breaks your back, your heart, and your soul. You are bossed around by people who don”t care either for you, or the elderly and infirm you are caring for. All the while, the lower level administrative bosses slime false ‘concern’ for your supposed lack of doing the proper job they have sabotaged you from doing. They slime false concern for the sick and infirm, all the while continually ignoring their most basic needs.
No amount of hypocrisy is beyond the government regulatory staff and the corporate hacks that run this business. There must be a special place in Hell for them. They have a total moral vacuum inside themselves. Their paychecks depend on doing less and getting more profit squeezed out for the big wigs by doing as they do.
One thing to remember, too, is simply that the corporate government and their bosses, the corporations themselves don’t want to deliver any care at all. All care given subtracts from their profits since it is expensive. Just like how they often try to squeeze wages and benefits to the point of total disappearance, they do the same to the actual service they contract to provide. In doing so, the ‘free enterprise system’ creates hellholes for America’s elderly, and these hellholes now pockmark our landscape just like the military bases and prisons do. They are dull ugly spots most people try to ignore as they pass by.
Capitalism is not an efficient system. In its production of products it turns out gobs of garbage and scrap. In its production of services, it does even worse. It makes scrap out of live human beings.
You need care for your family member or yourself, but unfortunately you just get a false phony smile and a knife in the back while looking for that care. You want to believe…. Yet you find the elderly going down an assembly line to death, illness, and scrap. Corporations have turned the downward process of aging into a torture of the aged. It doesn’t have to be this way, but this is often what there is.
Progressive websites are raising money to defeat GOP Tourette’s poster child Joe Wilson in the next election. Is it going to work? No. You can’t stop populist assholes like Wilson, or Vitter, or Delay, or Gingrich, or Lieberman, can you? Incumbent embarrassments have legions of loyal constituents. That’s who you have to stop. If you want to stop Wilson you have to insist the South Carolina prosecutor’s office isn’t dropping charges of domestic violence, disorderly conduct, child truancy, poaching, littering, lying about sales use tax, and loitering at nursing homes trying to register voters. Shroud that crowd in red tape and Joe Wilson’s base will head for the hills.
Mom, your kid has just come down with the Runs-from-Hell and you are without medical insurance, so what do you do? He needs hospitalization, but incredibly enough, it was probably hospitalization of Junior’s aunt that gave him what he has in the first place! Your kid picked up C-diff, an infectious diarrhea, during his visit to her in the hospital!