Thursday, November 29, 2018

When a Private Equity Shop Buys a Nursing Home, It Ain't Good for the Patients

  
By Charles P. Pierce

Private-equity firms serve some purpose, I'm sure. However, it is of paramount importance that private-equity firms are kept away from any business that deals in real life with actual human beings, because private-equity firms have demonstrated a positive genius in converting even the sick and the old into dividends and windfalls and other species of mathematical inhumanity.
The latest example comes to us from The Washington Post.
A disabled man who had long, dirty fingernails told them he was tended to “once in a blue moon.” The bedside “call buttons” were so poorly staffed that some residents regularly soiled themselves while waiting for help to the bathroom. A woman dying of uterine cancer was left on a bedpan for so long that she bruised.
The lack of care had devastating consequences. One man had been dosed with so many opioids that he had to be rushed to a hospital, according to the inspection reports. During an undersupervised bus trip to church — one staff member was escorting six patients who could not walk without help — a resident flipped backward on a wheelchair ramp and suffered a brain hemorrhage. When a nurse’s aide who should have had a helper was trying to lift a paraplegic woman, the woman fell and fractured her hip, her head landing on the floor beneath her roommate’s bed.

Click here for the full article. 

Source: Esquire 

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