Reply #4: I would be willing to bet they had no "hurricane plan." [View All]

[man4allcats]

That sounds like lawyer talk to me. Regrettably, far too many U.S. nursing homes never really plan for anything. "Proactive" is, for the most part, not in their vocabularies. They refer to their plans when they get caught with their pants down, as happened here, in an effort to try to sell the regulatory and investigative agencies on the idea that they actually had a plan in the first place. Though it is now two years old, Senator Charles Grassley's (R, Iowa) bipartisan letter (pdf file - may load slowly) to Mark McClellan, former administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which letter was I believe never answered, illustrates well even now two years after its writing the sad state of nursing home care in America. Nursing home residents are easily taken advantage of by a system that all too frequently maximizes profits at the expense of quality of care. The exploitation is wide spread because the residents are usually poor, almost always old and in generally declining health. In short, they don't typically have the resources to fight back, and the nursing homes know it. Consequently, greed usually triumphs over the much hyped but largely untrue Golden Years Scenario pitched by the nursing homes to prospective clients and their families. The state of nursing home care in the United States is the national disgrace that is too often not spoken of at all or spoken of only as a whispered dirty little secret. If you have a loved one in a nursing home and want to know more about the problem and what you can do to try to insure a higher level of care for your friend or family member, click National Citizens' Coalition for Nursing Home Reform. It is the oldest and arguably most knowledgeable U.S. site dealing with the subject.