They Stayed
I found this really cool story about a California nursing home that closed last fall. Everybody left but…..the 16 residents were still there! Unbelievably, Cook Maurice Rowland and janitor Miguel Alvarez stayed. They spent “several days providing round-the-clock care for elderly patients, doling out medication, bathing, feeding, and looking after them”. Finally a local fire department and sheriff took over Valley Springs Manor nursing home, and their actions eventually led to legislation in California known as the Residential Care for the Elderly Reform Act of 2014, which protects nursing home residents from being abandoned in the case of a shutdown.
There are still good people in this world. It’s nice to know that. Now for some fun. I have no idea where the administrators of the place went but let’s take a guess. I’ll start and then you chime in:
- They were still going to meetings every day, oblivious to reality, because that is what administrators do.
- They were getting promoted in the organization for a job well done at Vally Springs Manor.
Your turn.
How about giving these two heroes the money paid to those “administrators” who should then spend time confined without any kind of care or hygiene, strapped into wheelchairs for good measure.
So thankful for the good people like these two.
Administrators receive:
Bonus (cut down on expenses)
PLUS
Golden Parachute (when they leave)
(play rim shot now)
No need to come up with farcical suppositions.
It is well known that nursing homes are at the epicenter of Medicare, Medicaid, and general insurance fraud, and are tremendous profit-makers (Google Bernard Bergman, if you don’t remember him, or are a young kid). The people who run these places bill Medicaid and Medicare to the max, aggressively go after all assets of the residents, and provide the absolute bare minimum of services, especially to patients who are helpless or incapable of describing what’s going on to outsiders.
In all likelihood, the owners reached a point where they had squeezed all they could out of the residents, and felt the heat moving in, so decided to split while the splitting was good.
As usual, the employees were left holding the bag (who hasn’t experienced the pressure of “If you call out sick, Doctor / Nurse, there is no replacement, and your patients / coworkers will suffer…”), while the owners / administrators, who really don’t give a flying fuck about the patients, skate.