Nursing homes and other long-term care facilities are playing a sad, familiar, and disturbing role in the U.S. health system’s teetering on the verge of collapse in too many parts of the country due to the coronavirus pandemic. The owners and operators of the care facilities for the aged, sick, and injured insist they have….
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Hospices a hot investment as profiteers seek a buck to life’s very end
Profit-raking private investors, aka hedge funders, have taken aim at operations intended to help the elderly, desperately ill, and grievously injured experience a dignified death. The rapacious takeover of the hospice industry nationwide ought to be setting off political and regulatory alarms in a rapidly graying nation. As is typically the case when MBA-driven interests….
Continue ReadingNursing homes hide violations with behind-scenes maneuvers
The battle to safeguard the elderly, sick, and injured residents of the nation’s nursing homes and other long-term care facilities is far from over — and the fight may be even tougher than advocates for the vulnerable may have imagined. That’s because the facilities employ aggressive tactics to contest safety and other violations found by….
Continue ReadingHospitals struggle to keep nurses, as nursing homes stall on staff shots
The U.S. health care system and all who rely on it may be reaching painful reckonings on how the coronavirus pandemic keeps affecting caregiving personnel, whether with highly trained nurses who are forcing hospitals to pay them more or see them leave or with poorly paid and ill-trained aides who still aren’t getting Covid-19 shots….
Continue ReadingNursing homes misdiagnose and sedate residents with strong drugs but lag on vaccinating staff
The nation’s nursing homes, battered by the coronavirus pandemic, are under more fire for their resurgent reliance on powerful and risky psychiatric drugs and shaky diagnoses of mental illness to treat elderly residents, as well as for the institutions’ inability to safeguard the old, sick, and injured in their care by ensuring their staff are….
Continue ReadingNursing homes recorded a horrific pandemic toll. But it may be even worse.
In recent days, academic researchers and politicians have made distressing disclosures about the terrible toll the coronavirus pandemic took on the aged, injured, and sick in nursing homes and other long term care facilities with new data suggesting the disease infected more of the vulnerable and killed more of them than previously known. Government officials,….
Continue ReadingHospitals battered with Delta surge, storms, wildfires, and influx of sick kids
As tens of millions of travelers hit the road to enjoy the Labor Day weekend, public health officials warned the unvaccinated anew against moving around freely during the holiday marking the unofficial end of summer. Authorities cautioned the vaccinated, too, against letting their guard down as the Delta variant fuels a fourth, deadly surge in….
Continue ReadingA big sign of more long-term care problems: Nursing homes’ staffing struggles
Nursing homes and other long-term care facilities keep bleeding staff, and their inability to hire and keep workers poses significant risks to the well-being of aged, sick, and injured residents — a vulnerable group already savaged by the coronavirus pandemic. The long-term care industry employed 3 million personnel in July, which is 380,000 fewer staff….
Continue ReadingDelta surge gets grimmer as both public health steps and resistance stiffen
The coronavirus has killed almost 630,000 Americans, with the pandemic adding in its fourth surge now under way 1,000 deaths a day or 42 fatalities per hour. The disease has infected almost 38 million of us, with more than 145,000 new cases occurring each day in recent weeks. More than 90,000 coronavirus patients were in hospitals nationwide….
Continue ReadingSenate Democrats tackle nursing home menaces that also made virus so lethal
Senate Democrats, including chairs of two powerful committees, have started to tackle the nightmarish problems that experts blame for allowing the coronavirus pandemic to take a terrible toll on vulnerable residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. Under a bill introduced by Ron Wyden, an Oregon senator and chair of the Senate Finance….
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